04 Aug your minutes in Augusts by Katie Naughton
holds us in hollows of its
blue dying eyes my grandfather
came back downstairs to talk
about the Wisconsin dells vacations
their geography how the word
lived past its meaning its afternoon
its last time saying the man
a place I had never been with him
a place I stopped for gas going back
to Minnesota one horizon
the rock and sky trees moving in wind
shaded water in a place with no sound
asphalt road and green and grass and grass
failed to attend you haze on the horizon
storm coming in sudden
windy dinner cooling on the air
promising water promising plains I never
was childhoods bicycling fifty years
before I was in the rain on my birthday
the cake inside my family inside
waiting held there in time waiting backwards
to their birthdays their bicycles parents
in the dress of the day butter yellow
seersucker bright madras French dots
milk glass beaded porcelain butter cream
some days those days we left our families
left the house ourselves to rain and pine
About the Poet
Katie Naughton is a poet who recently moved to Brooklyn from Buffalo, NY. She is a doctoral candidate in the Poetics program at SUNY – Buffalo working on a dissertation on opacity and non-self-identity in experimental poetry by women. She is also a former teaching artist for Just Buffalo Literary Center.
Naughton holds an MFA in creative writing from Colorado State University and was a resident at the Vermont Studio Center in August 2019. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Bennington Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Jubilat, Tupelo Quarterly, Tagvverk, and elsewhere.
This poem appears in her debut full-length collection of poetry The Real Ethereal published on August 1st by Delete Press. She is also the author of the chapbooks Study (above/ground press 2021) and A Second Singing (Dancing Girl Press, 2022).
Naughton is the outreach editor for Essay Press, assistant editor at the HOW(ever) and How2 Archive, and founder of Etcetera, a web journal of reading recommendations from poets.
The Poem of the Week feature is curated by literary legacy awardee R.D. Pohl.