Strange Litany
By Katie Peterson
Originally published in CutBank 68
Ask me anything. I’ll never say
I don’t want to talk.
This isn’t to say
there’s no principle of selection.
I exclude what I like.
Now you ask about the soul.
Monarch with a hole
in the northwest corner
of its wing, a tatter
in the fabric, flying like that.
I should have expected it.
But the question: do you think
your soul is female? I could
never have expected, being
female, unused to you
or anyone else
using my name
to call me what I am.
End of summer, look how
I’ve turned you
into what I want. Beginning
of fall, first angular horizons,
look at the leaves of the aspens,
their backsides ready for it.
What turns around makes everything
a curtain on a stage
about to open up.
Queasy with sleepiness, right
before lunch, I watched
the monarch which had gone
to twice its size expand
its wings slower than it ever had.
I’ve a friend who says
the lamas of Tibet
find it comical
how much we hate ourselves.
I’d like to shift
from this shape
not out of hate but from delight.
But I’m not answering
any more questions.
I think you know, from what my legs did
and from the cry I made
how much I’d like
to become something else.
Ask me that way from here on out.
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Katie Peterson teaches creative writing and the humanities at Deep Springs College. She was born in California and is the author of a book of poems, This One Tree (New Issues, 2006).