Kathryn Bennett is a 32-year-old writer from Grand Junction, Colorado. She has lived many lives in many worlds, including a laissez les bons temps roulers stint in New Orleans. Her favorite food is still pizza. Kathryn’s background includes a Master’s in Public Health, during which she learned marketing strategies for getting people to “buy” things they hate, such as vegetables and exercise. Her chapbook, Help Me Reach 1,000 Likes: A collection of poems for the Technology Age was released February, 2017 and is available in physical print or digitally on Amazon.

Visitant is featuring selections from her chapbook Help Me Reach 1,000 Likes: A collection of poems for the Technology Age.

Morgan & Japan & Me

When I was 15 I passed magic notes to a boy in
Indiana.
We talked mostly about the moon.
And in the phases of puberty and questioning
computers
And learning the science of ourselves
we imagined and built the night.

In 1999, infant words could first fly
Across the sea
Digits pulse between digits
Midwestern cornfields, fireflies exotic and heady
to me as the
Banyans, temples and habu snakes outside  my
door.

So much longing for the glittered pastiche
Plastic, consuming capitalist monolith
The States! U-S-A!
His stories help me unearth
what I think might be home, as
The elegant sandalwood-scented world fades
away, unwanted
Fine calligraphy and tidy little paintings
shoved to the back of the closet
waiting for grown-up notice.

We are what Americans look like
Two blonde archetypes
Each within and without what we know as
Global society global propriety
Seeking orientation in the glowing ether.

Purged from my own culture and cultivating the
margins
In space …

… I had the first cell phone at school
Talking to satellites millions of miles aloft.
Its magnitude weighty
A brick to crush my silence