Wrong Sonnet: Mystery

BY Kathleen Winter

If ghosts are real, they’re professional strangers.
If real, I owe you an apology. You can laugh at me
in this and in our past lives —
in laughter we shudder together.
If knowledge from before this life is
in our cells what couldn’t we know —
distinct from university psychology —
medicine we grow, gather without purchasing.
If knowledge from outside ourselves is real
then by what particle or path or current
shall I encounter it from the ground,
my ears filled with birdcall, rushing
trains, my morning arms sore blue
and only a small cavity to hold
this strange, two-chambered faithfulness?

 

Biography

KATHLEEN WINTER‘s poems have appeared in The New Republic, FIELD, Anti-, Memorious, 32 Poems, Tin House, and The Cincinnati Review. Her chapbook, Invisible Pictures, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2008. She has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the Virginia G. Piper Center. In 2010 her work was selected by the City of Phoenix for its 7th Avenue Streetscape Public Arts Project. Kathleen is an MFA student at Arizona State University, where she is a poetry co-editor of Hayden’s Ferry Review.

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