With the words I create from the tiles I braid the language together to form the start of a poem. The goal of the project is interrogate and subvert expectations regarding gender roles in domestic spaces, in families, and beyond.īut sometimes my process merely involves a snatch of language or a game of Bananagrams if I am really stuck. My Good Housekeeping (what GH stands for in the poem title) project uses the kinds of articles that were included in Good Housekeeping, the magazine, but it also borrows from texts like Amy Vanderbilt’s and Emily Post’s etiquette books. Currently I am working from a lot of archival documents and family stories, which is a separate, but perhaps similar project as the Good Housekeeping project that “GH: Family Tree” is a part of. There have definitely been periods of dormancy, but I guess, to reveal my age, I have been writing about 15 years. I was very lucky to have a high school English teacher who helped foster my writing, which wandered toward poetry around age 15 or 16. Katherine, how long have you been writing poetry? What is your process? What themes are you usually drawn to? Her first chapbook, Once Read as Ruin, was published by Finishing Line Press.Īn interview with Katherine Gaffney on process and subject Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in jubilat, Harpur Palate, Mississippi Review, Meridian, and elsewhere. Katherine Gaffney completed her MFA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is currently working on her PhD at the University of Southern Mississippi. Red, weighted as the rabbit you learned to skin.

To the womb that had no escape and pulled you, Your bed will be there as your father wasn’t when the waxyīlue paper wafted over your mother’s belly,Īs the doctors sunk their scalpels past her muscles Nut that fell from your mother over a toilet or pulledįrom her on a table as your grandfather pulls the nutty kitsįrom the doe. Unlived lives of this womb stopped, midĬycle, not unlike the lives ranging from bloody mess to fleshy Life, of hanging pelts and knives and skulls dried cleanĪnd milky. He took over the kits’ extractionįrom the now still life womb. Spine, her only hope of extracting the one life The brief fire in the shot down your mother’s Never meant to kill, the womb filled with kits not done The doe, the female rabbit, your grandfather The imminence of life in an egg, brewing lives in the doe’s The distance of the shift from coop to table to dodge The distance of experience through a lens. Kept replacing with new cassettes as your mother neverĭilated, as she and the doctor prepared for an epidural.

He will be there, notīehind the bulky camcorder in which your father Your love will be there to fill in the aged,īlank paper, to see how you would accomplish See the changes nature makes between drawingĪnd trudging.

Liquid rhythm hide empty tracks