The helicopter browses over
the city on the verge of waking, a waterfall
of alarm.
Where is everything you try not to see?
A cat crossing the final street, backlit by headlights.
Or some man sleeping, cuddled up next to his gun,
or killing.
I don’t mean to be literal, but what is the door
the bullet makes in the body? Where does it
lead
and what do we call it—body?
The helicopter browses over
the city on the verge of waking, a waterfall
of alarms—
Photocredit: pxhere via Creative Commons
About the author
Katie Farris is an award-winning fiction writer, poet, and translator. She is the author of the hybrid-form text boysgirls, (Marick Press, 2011) and the chapbooks Thirteen Intimacies (Fivehundred Places, 2017), and Mother Superior in Hell (forthcoming from Dancing Girl in 2019). Most recently she is winner of Fairy Tale Review’s Flash Fairy Tale Prize, the 2018 Anne Halley Poetry Prize from the Massachusetts Review, and the 2017 Orison Anthology Prize in Fiction. She is also the translator of several books of poetry from the French, Chinese, and Russian. Her translations and original work have appeared in anthologies published by Penguin and Graywolf, as well as literary journals including The Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, Verse, Western Humanities Review, and The Massachusetts Review. She received her MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University. Currently, she is an Associate Professor at San Diego State University.
