Poetry by Kat Mulligan

    Vincent Parsons CC




MIDDLE ROAD
While Shaughnessy grinds its teeth down in sleep,
I mill around with middle-road feeling
through the sunsore night.

I think now and then of gnawing a buttonhole
through the hour,
through my vinyl eye I sweat into somebody’s palm,
a car billows down the street
like a ribbon let loose from hair…

I no longer love,
but how rabid were my attempts
before pitchdark reclined upon a lusterless sky.

My scent wafted around soirees in search of full body,
in search of host,
and in resolute dehydration my snout would rise
from the bittersweet murk of daylong legs.

Today,
I only dabble in the longing that furrows the brow
as if in a rain-tortured homecoming.

Adrift in skeletal wind,
I think of rounding out the cupped caresses of
someone familiar,
I think of palewhite bones in a hand—now and then--
I glimpse the crooked hill and its eruption into sidewalk
and finally recall the uselessness
of a mouth doubling in heat.

Privileged to be sculpted by my own way,
I slink in middle-road feeling into the weathered jaw
of my quarter,
easy in sheets.

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Kat Mulligan is a Virginia-born, Montreal-based writer.