Featured Poet: Kate Rose

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DYE FACTORY
 
You need never go
nearer. The dance means not touching
the hand. Never.
Back and forth
tapping the racks
reading each other
to measure
time and times.
Each became
themselves while face to face
silent
hands stretched over
that stone vat.
 
 


UNTOUCHABLE
 
You don’t need to know
how I wipe mine.
You wipe yours with
the whitened plaques of my skull.
They are pretty. Like jasmine.
You make it so.
 
I am blue.
I make shoes glow.
I make old new.
I empty the bucket
to fill it up
fill it up
fill it up
so you can love and pray
so I can pray and love.
The difference is smells
and bones.
 
 


DIASPORATED
 
Today somewhere
waves are same
but all is white.
How can I nevermore?
I leave to grow bad.
Shards of together – jewels.
We live everywhere.
If we feel we feel cold.
If we feel we feel hunger.
Burn the photos before they fade.
All are the same in Love.
No one is the same
in pain.
 
 


NAKED
 
My history has vanished –
crushed false stone
pages erased. Because wrong.
I found the book in the waves
who swallowed letters off the page.
Glitter is just plastic.
Under my skin
gashes tell
in forgotten sanskrit –
must I learn?
Must I live to tell
the Nothings?
Or multiply in me
the round rice the fields didn’t reclaim?
The pink breeze answers
be where?
And then it comes:
Do you promise?
Yes, promise.
Do you love me? Love.
 


 
ROOTS
 
Someone once taught me
the waves.
Some forgotten kindness
jewel-sealed
in a shipwrecked brain.
Wolf-raised orphan
head ducking so calm below
so calm just beyond.
Don’t be like those
bulbs six feet under
dangling backward green hairs
from scalp of sand scratched by crabs.
They, with the first thunder
do not wait to be tugged
from rootholds. They go
unshackled to meet
shore and death
to be like the beach-striped tribe.
If someone taught me –
and that because I know –
it means I was not
so alone.

As a professor in a Chinese university, and previously while earning a PhD in France, Kate's research interests have included magical realism, feminist utopia, and world literature. She has published three books in French, including one novel. In addition to academic writing, her work appears regularly in Rain and Thunder: A Radical Feminist Journal of Discussion and Activism. She cannot yet write fiction in Mandarin, but is plodding towards this with five new words per day. These poems are part of a (not yet published) larger collection called "Indias Divine." 

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