Tract Housing, 1950s

My father pushes a red mower

with swirling blades he sharpens

first, scraping a black stone over

every spiral edge. His grass is precisely

one inch high from top

to bottom.

 

I roll in the neat cut, stubble pricks

my cheek. Sneeze. Face down

damp ground, green spears pierce

near wormholes, miniature mountains,

volcanoes spewed by ridged wriggles,

dark pink, tubular, timid.

 

One Sunday morning he rents

a boat, rows us into the harbor

to drop hooks. Our bait is night

crawlers. They’re bigger than

regular worms and try harder

to escape, and you can dig

them only after dark.

They bite and squirm when

he stabs them with the hook,

jams them down till the insides

ooze out. We catch three flat

flounder.  A bottom feeder

now it’s old, one has two eyes

on its back, none on the white

belly. He slits them open,

scrapes out the guts, slices off

the head. That night, we bite

white flesh on white

plates, wield engraved

silver forks and knives.

I know he doesn’t like me

flattening the grass, but

I can’t help myself.

 

Karen Kilcup

Raised in the area the Abenaki people called Quascacunquen, Karen Kilcup is the Elizabeth Rosenthal Excellence Professor Emerita at UNC Greensboro. She is a past president of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers and the Robert Frost Society. Her academic books include Fallen Forests: Emotion, Embodiment, and Ethics in American Women’s Environmental Writing, 1781-1924, which was supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and was named a Choice magazine Outstanding Academic Title, as was her Who Killed American Poetry?: From National Obsession to Elite Possession. Since 2020, Kilcup has focused on writing poetry and has published in numerous anthologies and journals, including Poetry East, Minnesota Review, and Poet Lore. Her book The Art of Restoration (2023) was awarded the 2021 Winter Goose Poetry Prize, and her chapbook, Red Appetite (2023), received the 2022 Helen Kay Poetry Chapbook Prize. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she has a second chapbook, Black Nebula (2023). The title poem from her second full-length collection, Feathers and Wedges (2024), was awarded the 2022 Julia Peterkin Literary Award for Poetry. She lives in the seacoast of New Hampshire with her partner Alan, in the company of skunks, bobcats, coyotes, foxes, otters, fishers, and bears.