Thirty-two by Kate Burrows

I stay up too late for someone who keeps aging
against my wishes:
the aging-
not the staying up late; I want to catch the gloaming
the nightfall and rosy 4am
calls to rise.

The young can catch the early dawn
a shared secret between them and
the beetles scurrying across dewy
grass and fat worms;
not nightcrawlers, but those of the early rising type-
the ones who are afraid of robins
and sharp beaks.

I stay up too late for someone who is afraid of the
dark
and the trembling jelly creature who lives
under my bed-
the one who touched my heel
when I was young and of the early rising type.

That scream settled it
no more late nights for me zombies
and, fantastically, handsome sailors
lived under my bed, waiting to drag
me into the undertow
but now it's just one lone sock and a stowaway dream.


Kate Burrows, New Jersey, USA

Cloud Atlas by Kate Burrows

It’s dusty, this almanac of dreams.
Yellowed pages crinkle under the weight of
shape shifters swords
and seraphim inhabit the same page
before unicorns but long after
castles and labyrinths.
Spring grass against our warm bodies,
see my daydream dance before the world.
My mother morphs into my lost dog
then just his tail remains which sticks to
the letter A, making it A-tail.

Book of liminality it taunts us unreachable
from a cloudless canvas.
Nothing to be written on blue skies
devoid of white ink
missing dancing hippos and princesses cavorting
until the fairy dust again returns,
creating new pages in a compendium of better worlds.


Kate Burrows, New Jersey, USA

Notes from a small boat by Kate Burrows

Sweeping from darkening skies
come fisher bats gulping
young piranha in the gloaming
consumed in a rush of algae ripe in
fresh water

the
Symphony of cicadas and frogs
drown my thoughts
pushing them to Amazonian depths
to asphixiate in primordial mud.
Chaos of Times Square and the Roman Coleseum
collide on a hand-hewn boat

Our engine stopped.
One paddle for eight.

Dusk shifts to night
draining sunrise from my cells
to replace lightness with the
anaconda spirit within.
I become the river and the
river is the night.

Kate Burrows, New Jersey, USA