A Delicacy Like Every Other - After Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Man-Moth” - Katie Vogel

I will lose track 
of how my feet squelched 
between felled corn stalks
their soles pressing
into bright red clay
pleading to be close
to the earth
and what it knows 
between one growing season
and the next.
 
And I already cannot tell you
how many bottles 
Will and I hauled 
from the creek bed 
each spring
or when hunting season began
in earnest or how Cassiopeia sat
in the sky when I'd lay
amidst the pine trees
to watch the ISS speed by
or the precise pattern 
of clovers and crabgrass 
in the gullies that only exist 
because of the buildings
buried beneath. 
 
But I will always tell you 
that every linguistic pattern
I’ve constructed since
is a moonbeam 
whose queer light washes over me,
when I am unseeing and unsought after
hunkered in the proliferating forest 
that sends its roots to every corner 
of my mindscape
 
And I am in love with the task
of chasing my selves into words
in a fashion that is neither Sysifian nor singular
but rather a self-propulsion 
up a wide and fertile hill
where I can be both 
unperturbed (and rather aroused)
devoted (but never doomed).
​

Katie Vogel is a writer and performer based in Brooklyn. A recent graduate of Pratt Institute, her work has appeared in BlazeVOX, MootPoint Magazine, and elsewhere. Her first chapbook, The Awakening, is out through Bottlecap Press.