Catherine Barnett

Catherine Barnett’s first book of poems, Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced, won the 2003 Beatrice Hawley Award and was published in 2004 by Alice James Books. A 2006 Guggenheim Fellow, she received the 2004 Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, a 2004 Whiting Writers’ Award, and a Pushcart Prize. Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Gulf […]

12 years ago

Aubade

Irregular song, irregular heartbeat, anaphora’s stutter that neither warns nor comforts: I thought it was a man’s voice all this time, calling for help. I thought it was a man calling scared from the ditch. Hopeless barking it was, a dog trapped somewhere, and lonely— then suddenly quiet. Someone must […]

18 years ago

The Disbelieving

We all saw how beautiful she looked those first six months when she walked a thousand miles— over the University Bridge and under it and into and out of the Arboretum and up the hill to the sundial we circled every day while the days got longer and my sister more beautiful, her […]

18 years ago

Living Room Altar

Except for the shirt pulled from the ocean, except for her hands, which keep folding the shirt, except for her body, which once held their bodies, my sister wants everything back now— If there were a god who could out of empty shells carried by waves to shore make amends— If the […]

18 years ago

Site

The dirty sand everyone said was beautiful wasn’t—it was dirty, or oily, something turning it to hardness. It was ugly when we were told beautiful, shattering when it was supposed to make us whole, cold when it should have been warm and all of us dressed in wrong clothes because everything was wrong. We […]

18 years ago

Ritual

In his bath my son looks half- drowned, lying so still, his hair a scarf of weed, his eyes closed, and only the water breathing. He practices in his porcelain bed his resting, rehearsing until the water takes cold and he shivers a little against it. Ritual is from Into […]

18 years ago

Site, IV

At the bottom of the ocean— even there— the bones are picked clean. I suppose this must be common, this relentless cleaning, and the tiny sequin tossed into the bin of dirty water and our eyes gouged out with looking. Oh. Child. When did the child die? And how white are the whale’s bones. There, […]

18 years ago

River

Because here, this far east, this far away, there’s no Pacific, no sister, no clock set to the real time, I go down to the Hudson whenever I can. More broken than usual, all churned up and shaky, the river this morning makes no progress to speak of, nothing much floats by but a […]

18 years ago