Okay So Let Me Catch You Up
I try to keep the noise down but it comes as dull agony.
I’m going to have to learn to live with it.
Rubber soles slap the slick platform,
Hard heels kick back at the hollow.
I eye the broad-shouldered button-downs.
I spy so many nights and mornings.
It really does kick in at once, doesn’t it.
Suddenly there are leaves everywhere and I am wearing a light jacket.
You look around and begin.
Fuzzy edges hover, hang around hand-crafted.
I didn’t think about how I would feel in the morning.
Let the TV tell me more about what I’m missing.
I woke up high. I woke up like this.
A thin peel of translucent need. I lie
In the weeds of it. I feel my empty heat rattle.
Does this itch have no rub?
Full hem of smoke slipping past an archive of morning afters.
All I said was I love you!
I carry it like a shawl.
The pale leaves fold back to the lilac sky.
The vines shimmy in the vertical shadows of spring time —
Like, am I allowed to be out here right now?
I am exploring like you used to only now
I have time to chew at the sidewalk.
This morning I held my hand and it held back.
Gentle child waiting for the world to pull past
The veil of here and there waving in the early twitch of light.
What daybreak does this life return to?
Do you remember the lace I wore back when I thought I was fragile?
Before I found my fractures and framed them as road maps?
Don’t you see the coffins up ahead? The pavement that curves in?
Stop screeching at what won’t turn back.
He knows what I am and who
But he doesn’t know how I’ve become.
*
Kat Freeze is a poet and performer based in Chicago, IL. She was a 2023 Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Awards Semifinalist and the 2018 Louder Than a Bomb College Edition Slam Champion. Her writing has appeared in BeyondWords, Motley Magazine and 14East. Her chapbook, Wow! This Identity Crisis Just Keeps Going! is forthcoming from Bottlecap Press. She studied Writing, Rhetoric and Discourse at DePaul University.
