We were weeks without wind, sweltering,
swooning,
asunder: hallucinogenic blue—I don’t
even believe in blue,
how dripping, how humid, it sweats me
with distasteful
saturation. Everything blue is a
mirror. Our rickety interruption
bobbing, a fixed beginning point, like
when you first
touched my hand and I flinched back
from your softness, cringed.
Direction plus speed plus time. We
wound up adrift, horizonless.
Navigation always seemed something out
of last century,
seen through fog’s fine gauze. You and
I were born
onto the grid, points in time, moving
tremulously
under satellites, location on, distance
measured in moments,
assuming we’d always know the way back
home.
But I forgot to account for directional
drift—how like me.
I thought it would be romantic, that
we’d depend on the stars.
Katherine DeCoste is an uninvited guest on the unceded land of the Lək̓ʷəŋən (Songhees and Xʷsepsəm) peoples. Their poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in SICK Magazine, Grain Magazine, yolk, filling Station, Contemporary Verse 2 and elsewhere. Their chapbook Revelations of Divine Love recently appeared with above/ground press, and they are currently working on a full-length collection of poetry. They’re online sporadically at katherinedecoste.com.
the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan
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