Sarah Kortemeier


Dear K—


Your father is panting and dying
next to a beige blanket, no comfort,
and you think about the cancer shawl
you said you’d make but didn’t.
Full of reds and golds for a man
who has not much of either left,
soft as the scent of Christmas cookies,
wrapping the skin up safe from winter.
But it’s a blanket of the mind, not
of the pallid bed frame, not of the hospital,
not of the now. By the time
you could stitch your way to the end, by the time
you could bind off, this now
will be a different now, one with holes in it,
and wind pouring through like memory.

Also by Sarah Kortemeier: Interview, "Survival"
In the store: "Survival" (broadside)

 

photo: Patri Hadad

Sarah Kortemeier is the author of Ganbatte, which won the Felix Pollak Prize from the University of Wisconsin Press, and A RI OT POETICS, which can be found online at The Offending Adam. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly Review, Fairy Tale Review, and Under a Warm Green Linden, among others. She lives in Tucson, where she serves as Library Director at The University of Arizona Poetry Center.

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