how i know i'm on the right plane
every man on this flight
looks like every one of my cousins
that is to say:
they are big men
with laugh lines and imperfect teeth
that is to say:
they all have slow fists but
being bred on sour milk and tenacity
they are all used to winning anyway
and the man seated across the aisle
who took pictures of me while I was sleeping
has the same look on his face
as Michael did while he sat at Aunt Lucille’s table slugging vodka after Daniel’s funeral (open casket
despite the hole in his head) and
when he heard me creep into the kitchen for water
he grabbed me by the hair and pulled
so he could cry privately into the crawling junction of my neck and shoulder
that is to say:
his touch was unwanted, hot and like any repeated wear does it roughened the skin for a long time
Ode to Mucormycosis
It took broken nails but I have learned that to bury is not
to fossilize. To fossilize
is to make permanent and holy,
with some intention of discovery and display.
To bury is to quiet, to work with soft dirt
and worms, with the hard flex of a shovel and reach
where old roots still curl
to touch, to sleep.
True, I did not want this so close to me still.
So I dug deep.
But not that deep. And I left it pale, bare.
I put it somewhere inside me, a place that is
soft, and breathes as all good earth breathes.
Somewhere it can be found
by growing things that delight and feed,
so that one day there will be no meat,
all bone, and then no bone,
just fabulous mulch,
nothing to excavate and mount on the wall,
nothing to dig up out of the backyard
to take home again, wondering.
Kate Castellana is currently a student of psychology and English. She attends university in the Pacific Northwest, where she won third place for poetry in the Teppola Creative Writing Contest. She is the co-president of her university's literary magazine, Argot. Her work has been previously published in Blue Marble Review, and Ohio State Lima's literary magazine, Asterism.