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Writer's pictureA Too Powerful Word

Kate Garrett


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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