Kate Garrett (1980) has a BA (Hons) in Creative Writing (first class honours) from Sheffield Hallam University. She is the author of several books. Her poetry has been nominated once for a Pushcart Prize, four times for Best of the Net, and The Density of Salt was longlisted for best pamphlet in the Saboteur Awards 2016. Her pamphlet You've never seen a doomsday like it was Poetry Kit book of the month for January 2018, and a Poetry Book Society Winter 2017 selection. She is the founding editor of the online journals Three Drops from a Cauldron, Picaroon Poetry, Lonesome October Lit, and Bonnie's Crew (which are all on hiatus until at least 2021). Kate is the Magical Editor for Mookychick magazine, and is also a contributing writer and editor at Pussy Magic.
Mint Car
It was the furthest thing from “mint” –
one door didn’t lock, the other didn’t open,
the broken air con’s warm breath peppered
extra discomfort onto ninety-eight degree days.
But it had been my eighteenth birthday gift the year
before, when grandpa taught me how to drive.
From then I’d go where I needed to go,
wheels whirling over asphalt,
crystalline guitar and bass in my veins, Robert
Smith singing about a strawberry kiss,
the gothmobile hugging liquid bends
in sunlight – and it felt like flight.
The blue, green, gold, and grey
threads wound a tunnel around
that ancient ghost-black Ford – last factory
fresh when I was half the girl I’d grow to be.
Here I drove on my own, raising my voice
and my face to the clouds, until I passed
the spot where my grandfather died
behind the wheel of his own car,
where I rode the brake, let my woman-child
heart crack pink to grey, cushioned
by fields and sky, kept in check between hills
and rockslide warning signs.
You’ve Never Seen a Doomsday Like It
He opens the car door for two sweat-and-dirt sculpted
children with ten cent hope – their earth-scent rising
as they root through decades of leftovers, synthetic dreams
once resting on every child’s lips: Smurfs, Garfield, He-Man.
My life at bargain prices, in stasis, this millennial cusp.
An askew Rockwell: the boy and girl treasure hunting
as the July sun makes toffee of the driveway, holds itself
multiplied in each cell of each husk of the rows of green corn
along the road from here to the village.
He asks where I’m going.
London, I say, the one in England, not Ohio. His face
doesn’t darken or cloud the way they say faces do;
his eyes stay the same blue when he says I am right
to get out. Either get away or load your gun. This year
2000 isn’t going to be pretty. These cornfields will burn.
Houses will be searched, he says, and I’ll be dragged away
like the rest. And he’s going to get his wife and kids
and keep driving. But you get on that plane,
he says, don’t come back –
my life spread out on folding tables between us,
the man laying down five American dollars for pieces
of my childhood; five American dollars
I will change to pounds sterling, while they’re
still worth something, while we have the choice.
Something You See in Movies
Hotel sheets are waves at rest over her hips –
their scratch softens
where they kiss her skin:
the other girl, the other bed.
Sweat stains the room at 3:54AM
and my comfort is her deepest breaths –
my comfort is the dreams behind her eyelids
of seafoam surrealism, of rolling with a landscape
smudged from oil pastels.
He wants me to wake her, his voice crawls
down my neck to lick between my collarbones.
My focus blurs as threats hula-hoop
my eye sockets, and in my head I’m still stumbling
down a humid street on our midnight sojourn,
childlike, from the bar, hoping to see steam rising
from a manhole – we found one, they exist, it isn’t only
something you see in movies. This is New York, real life,
and I refuse to touch the other girl, in the other bed.
My heart beats me backwards to where I am
three years ago: Ohio, crashed out, giggling
stoned under her living room blacklight
that time we all got in a stranger’s car;
I borrowed a novel from him
no one else had heard of and woke up
with nothing but a hangover.
My heart xylophones my ribs
as hands pull me back to New York,
back to 3:59AM and through a door
- 17 -
by tangled hair and I can’t see if she still sleeps
or how this bathroom is so clean,
but the tiles are cold on my palms
and the tiles are cold on my knees.
This is the only reason he needs me.
don’t even try to bite
you just do as you’re told
And I do, because
adrenaline beats dopamine,
rock beats scissors
and paper covers rock.
(and I do as I’m told
because he loves me
he says he loves me
this is exactly why he loves me)
I focus on the tiles beneath me
not the burn like a hundred menthol cigarettes
in my throat, the ones I smoked and tossed the butts
into the fireplace at her mother’s house
four summers ago.
Later the other girl wakes up refreshed,
asks from the other bed if I’m going with her
to Greenwich Village. No. I can’t.
He sleeps. I stare out at the bricks
of the building next door,
close enough to touch if only the window would open.
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