Poetry by Katharine Whitcomb

     Roanish CC





Infinity Loop                   after Patricia Lockwood


How the mind finds scenes to replay--
               bad ones, of course, reanimated shame,

                               danger, humiliation—rising to the surface like
               corpses full of rot & gas. You thought you might 

weigh them down, destroy them w/ neglect, 
               wire a cinder block to each of their ugly necks. 

                               But they’re back. Not quite rape & no joke:
               truck driver in an abandoned smokehouse,

dog-faced lawyer on a cross-country train,
               the naked, hard-on-ed prowler, & you alone, 

                              by a skin of a whisper, by the split-second 
               thought-turn in a grown man’s mind, 

young, safe by just dumb luck each time. Close
               call, Miss Geography!  So very close. 





​For the Eldest Daughters


                petals fall 
from the vase of yellow tulips
                               pollen litters the table/ still life 

                today’s to-do list 
scratched on scrap paper/drier 
                               filter felted full of matted lint
    
                let the past sleep 
forever w/ its hoard of shame
                               let someone else shoulder blame

                whenever you fill 
the gas tank /even if 
                you’re alone/even to the blank air

                say this aloud 
you have four hundred twenty miles’ 
                               worth /now where do you want to go?





Katharine Whitcomb is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, including Habitats, published in January 2024 by Poetry NW Editions in the Possession Sound Series, Saints of South Dakota & Other Poems, which won the Bluestem Award, chosen by Lucia Perillo, and The Daughter’s Almanac, which won the Backwaters Prize, chosen by Patricia Smith. She was a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University and is the recipient of fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MacDowell, Yaddo, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, The Marble House Project, and elsewhere. Her work has been awarded the Grolier Poetry Prize, a Loft-McKnight Award, and the Nebraska Review Award in Poetry. Her poems and prose have been published in The Paris Review, The Yale Review, Bennington Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Narrative, Alaska Quarterly Review, Mississippi Review, The Missouri Review, New England Review, terrain.org, and many other journals and anthologies. She is a Distinguished Professor at Central Washington University and makes her home in northern Vermont. More information about the author and her work can be found at www.katharinewhitcomb.com.

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