Keetje Kuipers is a native of the Northwest. She earned a B.A. at Swarthmore College and an M.F.A. at the University of Oregon. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Oregon Literary Arts, and Soapstone. In 2007 she completed her tenure as the Margery Davis […]
There are a variety of ways to respond to despair: drinking, weeping, picking fights in bars. I took a lover under the stairwell of a brownstone at a party in Brooklyn. It was winter, had been a week of buttoned collars and long, black coats, of the nurses from St. Vincent’s taking their cigarette breaks […]
I eat chirashizushi, peel the raw fish from their sweet bed of seasoned rice. I know right now the beaten mares on 59th stomp slowly at the snowy curb, take great pitchers of air into their distended lungs and bloom from between yellowed teeth white peonies against the trees of Central Park. I have tried […]
At night his long body works above me, late into the hours that make themselves from dust, crafting the landscape out of midnight’s cloth, pulling Stockholm from behind the moon, its blue skies rendered in Delft ink, the cobblestone piers that part the water at its glistening seams, and then the summer evenings on the […]
They can’t keep their hands off each other, irresistible, the hard, narrow barbs of their hips, the feet long, having already outgrown the body in a fit of physical genius. New muscles are forming like buds every night in the seams of their flesh ‘til they wake to a flower that still lacks a certain […]
After the storm, my brother went to New Orleans to work demolition. He’s a skinny 6’2”, so you have to picture him suiting up like an astronaut in the giant Hazmat gear, long arms and legs encased in blue plastic as he waded through the waste land of street garbage, a red cross stamped on […]
Plant dander spins the air, wind spitting sawdust curls across my windshield like star- shards blown out a comet’s ass. The President’s on the radio again, making jokes with his press corps, using the nicknames he’s given them. I’m driving west, cutting down back roads past mud-rutted pig farms and hills studded with tree stumps—the […]
After all these years of not loving you, you’ve become the man I build every poem from, your naked shape the clay I mold to place at the base of a tree or in the soft folds of a morning bedroom. I make your hands into fruit and set them in bowls, your feet flower […]