Saint Sin
It's amazing I'm not shooting heroin
into my eyeballs. I have a thing for innocence.
Like, bad. Like, in a bad way.
Like I want to peel it off me
like lingerie. I'm beside myself
with grief for all the men I haven't fucked
just because I could. Listen:
I'm tired of being cute. On Tuesday,
I wore nothing but an apron and dismembered
an orange as though it were an oyster
or a man. Shucking cold fruit of their shells
saying love me love me love me.
Catch & Release
My home was the river
my father fished.
and I was the fish. I was born
with an open mouth, a curved needle
pierced through my cheek. I flossed with line.
He says—away with you! And I float roe-belly
towards the sun. He discards the trash—
the heart still beating, the nest
of veins thrown into the river
after the gutting, fingers
stretched through the spleen,
running the length of the glass-spun spine.
The Big Wood is shallow, water wrong
for this season. The Fish and Game water
their whiskey with a melted glacier.
One day soon, my father says, you will be good
with lemon.
When my father dies,
they toss me yet again over the side of the boat,
and I turn into a canoe.
(What a miracle
that I was a setting sail and you were an anchor,
claw-footed and sunk to the bottom of my sea).
Stonefly, watch, June bug—the sinker is on
the line.
It is my father and I floating now,
at the foot of the ladder, unable to make the jump.
His body light as my body, weighing nothing more.
There, we are boat and human,
and I the boat
and the fish
and my father
go down stream in our varnish.
Katrin Tschirgi is a poet and writer. She has a knack for stringing Christmas tree lights, and can can make a mean huckleberry pie. She is an artist of French pastries and escape. She can dance the Charleston. She received her MFA from Bowling Green State University where she taught creative writing and served as the managing editor for Mid-American Review. She currently live in Boise, Idaho. Contact her at TschirgiK@gmail.com.