Art Chowder September | October 2017, Issue 11 | Page 28

Self-portrait with Cephalopod and Digitalis Purpurea
-Katherine Smith
Sometimes a girl doesn’t need a reason to place
KATHERINE
SMITH
a foxglove blossom on her tongue. It’s enough
BY KAREN MOBLEY
to like the idea that the heart could stop because
of flowers. It’s that or be crushed like ichthyosaurus
in a kraken’s grasp by my own sadness, fossilized
in unnatural linear patterns, finally measured
by the geometry of loss. I don’t need another reason
to fear the ocean; I already know it could swallow me
from the inside if I tried to breathe it in. Everything
beautiful is dangerous, and attempting beauty’s
a risk, like the dress my mom’s friend made me
for the eighth-grade dance. So often, things don’t
hang together the way I imagine. That seafoam bow
over my pale, scant breasts looked nothing
like the pattern promised. It made my head hurt,
knowing how little meets our expectations,
so I refused the last dance and my date left
without me. He spent the next four years
pretending I wasn’t there, my shadow
scuttling the halls of the high school beside him.
Sometimes a girl doesn’t need a reason to want
to disappear behind the unseen framework
of collarbones. I think mine would look lovely
in a cephalopod’s garden after she’d spit away
the sateen straps. Have you ever wondered
what’s beneath the skin, working? I know
so little, I wouldn’t recognize my own heart if I saw it
outside my body. I wouldn’t know my own bones
arranged in an ocean bed, an octopus coaxing
them to root in the sea floor until their stalks
grew thick with mouthlike blooms.
28 ART CHOWDER MAGAZINE
What brought you to poetry?
I started reading and writing poetry in high school.
Of course a lot of what I was writing at that age was
typical teen angsty stuff, but still, there was something
about poetry that helped me access a part of myself that
I had no other way of accessing. And in reading poetry,
I found new windows into the world—new ways of
seeing and understanding the human condition,