poetry 0
Catherine Stearns


Detached from everything but the fluorescent
flatlands where bitchy angels rule
the morphine drip and gauge the numbers
in broken verticals like a child’s rain—

I was stroking her forehead when up up
she came swimming hard eyelids fluttering
hair in tangled piles like eelgrass bleached
with thin translucent strips of dulse still

breathing through washes of gray and
yellow-gray and green-going-to-gray
until there was no more color in the room
filled with body

Catherine Stearns’s work has been anthologized in collections of American and British poetry and writing by American women abroad. Her poetry has appeared in many journals.