Visual Poetry by Katrina Roberts
BOX OF AIR

BOX OF AIR, by Katrina Roberts ---- Box of air. Such a small valve. Each bit of a system aligned… From shadows, a voice, almost human. That one you lost? Pairs of things, so unlikely. The oily torch that rests at the base of pretty things, enchantments. By August, flames gobble the acres. Corn stubble like an unshaven cheek. The stitch in my chest. I gather heads to store seed, craving magic.

BOX OF AIR, by Katrina Roberts ---- Every year, after my boy was in the ICU, I can’t help fearing the cough I hear deep in his lungs, rattling. At The drift track, common word is that everyone kisses the wall eventually. It’s like a rite of passage. Yesterday, a redtail hawk screeched from the dead locust so that the dog went nuts, and the fawn the coyotes ate the entrails out of in the back pasture haunts me. How do we let our kids travel so far, our hearts leaving our body?

BOX OF AIR, by Katrina Roberts ---- I want only the best for all I love. How sobering to learn that nothing I could do would help the smaller ones navigating a trail I had forged. Their lives hold darknesses I cannot know, though I stretch my hands toward them. Shadows stretch across the stubbled fields. Something has only moments to live. I want to believe each day will usher in a new chapter. I’ll take anything.

Katrina Roberts’s books of poems include Likeness (full-color); Underdog; Friendly Fire; The Quick; How Late Desire Looks; and Lace (chapbook); she’s editor of Because You Asked. Her visual/verbal work appears in publications such as BOMB, Ilanot Review, Brink, Poetry Northwest, Brooklyn Review, Thrush, Interim; Iterant; Indianapolis Review, The American Journal of Poetry, and Permafrost, and anthologies like: Cascadia, A Field Guide Through Art, Ecology, & Poetry; Best American Poetry; and Evergreen: Fairy Tales, Essays, and Fables from the Dark Northwest. “Box of Air” appears in a book-length graphic-poetic sequence. She curates the VWRS at Whitman College. (www.katrinaroberts.net)

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