Poetry by Kirsten Kaschock

                         ​Alexandru Paraschiv CC


​
​
Tenet3

I stay between get and grief. Radiance 
is a dream I had of light. Even now 
the days are shaving themselves down, thinner 
and thinner, a prepubescent autumn. 
On some road to language I swerved off of 
Lolita dawdles, remade, remorninged.  
Dewiness does not become a woman 
of a certain age. Forty-eight puts me 
in mind of spiders, of Maman, Louise. 
I know of worse cells within which to spend 
September. Spread before me horizons 
of ever more intricate darkness—let 
me let them. I’ll at each vanishing point  
plant a leech. That’s what a moon is: bleeding. 
  




Tenet4
 
Plant leeches under the new moon. Bleeding 
the earth is advised by this almanac. 
Other remedies include: coast torchings 
hurricanes, floods, and virus. Winter will 
bring the desserts and they will be just per- 
fection. This is a poisoned state. Expect 
wild strawberries and whuppings. The best switch 
you cut for yourself: ours is ferocious. 
On ‘flix, the inside moon, a film extols  
the wonder of mushrooms—their synaptic 
undergrounds. To bloom from shit is to know 
listening. Once, while high, I climbed a tree 
and kissed a boy and read the leaves: the most   
knotty longing is but a minor love. 
 




Tenet5 
 
My nerves are knots. I long for love. To be
spectral, I just watch. Picture a life lived 
on the skin of things alone, blanched as if 
by lion’s tongue. Appalled. When I am out 
in the world my trick is to see, remain 
unseen. No industrial spill required 
to initiate powers I wield always 
from the shallows, subconsciously. This is 
how to be villain: feign innocence, face 
no consequences, flee each chance to root.  
A deep nomad lacks no home. All lands, sites  
of her haunting, streets—teeming with her need 
—to blow through others’ lives. Greedy gust, un-  
invited. When I am, I’m wrongly there. 
​

​

Kirsten Kaschock, a 2019 Pew Fellow in the Arts, is the author of four poetry books and a chapbook: Unfathoms (Slope Editions), A Beautiful Name for a Girl (Ahsahta Press), The Dottery (University of Pittsburgh Press/winner of AWP Donald Hall Prize), Confessional Science-fiction: A Primer (Subito Press), and WindowBoxing (Bloof Books). Coffee House Press published her debut speculative novel—Sleight. She teaches at Drexel University.

---