Karen Holmberg’s first book, The Perseids, was published by theUniversity of North Texas Press in 2001. A Discovery/The Nation award winner, her work has appeared in such magazines as The Paris Review, The Nation, Slate, Quarterly West, West Branch,Subtropics, and Southern Poetry Review. She lives in Corvallis, Oregon, where she teaches literature and poetry writing at Oregon State University.
Raised to watch for pilgrims in pond water or among stars, I detect a busy ordering in the peripheries of my sight, and catch dust mote legs shuttling silk from a diminutive abdomen, plumply angled as a full chignon. You float through the air, aswing on your trapeze, performing a dangling ritual dance off the […]
An odd infinitive, to crab, intention wavering like a spirit level’s bubble between ode and deed, teaching my nieces patience, I suppose; how some things must be taken unawares; that we can draw up a mystery in fingerbreadths of string, or lure it toward counterfeit moons. Placing the mesh between you and the depths you […]
Horseshoe Crab, Limulidae Funereal and everlasting: like the hundred- four year old Old World relic in the family album who held the deed to all that prime shore land, propped in broadcloth shellac’d with wear in the shell-backed rattan chair, seamed face pursed to an O. A museum plaque details your vast immunities: you can […]
The woman on the other side of emergency’s curtain groaned my babies my babies as a specially muffled drone imparted the bad news, and I saw beyond the hem the blunt hands of her feet clinging and rubbing, grey heels cracked like neglected dough, ankles traversed by puffy rivers, while on our side with tender […]
Sunk to the chin in warm inlet waters, some instinct nudged and I turned to see the harbinger of on-shore winds: the man o’ war lightly cantering over the tide ripples’ peaks. Through its skin, puckered as blown glass, the bright towels, neon buckets and shovels warped and bulged, violet hued: a world viewed through […]
Consider mayflies, daughter-caught in Bonne Maman jam jars, their wide variety: wax white, slate grey, grey green, with day-glo or popsicle orange eyes, some with striped stockings on, or wagging their triple-filament tails like puppies. They’ve gone through twenty nymphal stages in their stream, two years clutching a lump of black-slimed chert only to emerge […]
Karen Holmberg talks about her writing time and writing rituals.