These two poems by Katrina Papouskaya are at the cross-section of loss, longing, and fantasy. They speak, in different ways, on the desire for a place or person to call home…
by: Katrina Papouskaya
Alchemist I want to finish this to the end. You come turning a corner too fast like in that ‘Celibacy at Twenty’ Olds poem you love so much. I am your reverie and nightmare. Statistically a lot of women like to imagine me taking them. Statistically a lot of women have been taken but this is different from the control of imagining it. You like my indifferent face. You like the stalking across a stage, riling up a crowd, the hunched shoulders. I am turning away from you. I am throwing you small morsels because you think that’s how the world works. You’ll take what I give you and be grateful. I hold up your chin like a merciful villain. My smile is too close to a shark’s. You’ll grow up and learn being with a man like me is empty. You like a twist of the arm. You like me wild-eyed with anger. There’s a sigh I haven’t worked you up to yet and it bears my name. The girls at the edge of the stage feel it too. Be my groupie so I can say I had them in my whiskey- swirling age. By then, you’ll be free of me and happy. By then, I’ll lose a lung while you tie a ribbon in your marrying girl’s hair. It’s how you make something out of me when I’ve given you me.
It’s Gotten Cold at the Beach I was never any good at making friends. I want to break boundaries now, splinter them like a #2 pencil on an adolescent high school day. Boundaries – a month ago, I just wanted to hear myself think, to read while watching twilight descend outside a window taller than me, mess up my bedsheets then make them smell fresh again. Now, I’m hungry and wondering if it’s my fault I’m not helping dust the last of the sand off a girl’s shorts as we tie up our drying hair into something presentable in front of a beach bathroom mirror. There’s a muggy stench and again, it’s twilight. We’re going out for beers with the boys, a quarter of who we might flirt with, but mostly, they’re brothers. I was just trying to protect myself. What wanted to come to me would come to me; I wouldn’t sacrifice my cat’s company for a 5AM night’s end. Now, to make up for lost time, I’m curling my lashes and nursing hard ciders and lashing the page at home about all the lovely red disco lights; the way they paint my friends’ faces.
Katrina Papouskaya is a Belarusian-American writer currently residing in Brooklyn with her cat. She holds an MFA in poetry from The New School. Her poetry has been featured in Glassworks magazine, Miracle Monocle, and is forthcoming in Menacing Hedge.
