Catherine Zickgraf has performed her poetry in Madrid, San Juan, and three dozen other cities. But due to illness, her main jobs now are to hang out with her family and write more poetry. Her work has appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Pank, Victorian Violet Press, and The Grief Diaries. Her new chapbook, Soul Full of Eye, is published through Aldrich Press and is available on Amazon.com.

Heaven

Of shrill tone and rib yoke, she dreamed nightly,
moan-soaked/stripped mute, lit in burlap moon.
Her patriarch unoathed her, stole her from God’s
pocket, walked her white down an aisle on fire.

Opening ceiling, she rope-slid from bedroom oaks,
rode her soles up the road, boated down the coast
in cesspit coats, throat bones sewn closed. So they
sent smoke scarves roaming veins inside her walls.

And the household awoke, from the halls they fled,
but her locked mouth couldn’t seek air or call out.
Snakes of fire into hair, seeping tides of quiet ache,
she hid in the drapes, awaiting her slow cremation.