Kathy Kremins
Kathy Kremins (she/her) is a retired public school teacher and coach. She has an MFA from Goddard College and a D. Litt. from Drew University. Her chapbook Undressing the World is forthcoming (Finishing Line Press, 2022). Kathy’s work appears in Soup Can Magazine, The Night Heron Barks, Lavender Review, The Stillwater Review, Divine Feminist: An Anthology of Poetry & Art by Womxn & Non-Binary Folx, Stay Salty: Life in the Garden State, and other publications.
Shedd Aquarium, Chicago, 2003
-provoked by Pierre Huyghe Zoodram 5
(after “Sleeping Muse” by Constantin Brancusi)
(2011)
no chronology here
we only have our bodies
seconds of puncture
a blink
you on the other side
looking at through the tank
constructed space
hermit crabs & arrow crabs
your favorites
our landscape
living in-between
worlds meanings languages
enclosure of crustaceans & basalt
your floating head
Brancusi’s “Sleeping Muse”
asymmetrical face on my pillow
stolen in the night
there is no story here
just repeated object
strange & beautiful creatures
walking through the shedd
after disruption
you hold my hand another room
avoiding narrative arc
leaning in
sometimes our eyes meet mostly not
watching you watch the crabs
part installation part intimacy
you dream of swimming with dolphins
blink
you naked in provincetown moonlight
blink
you deconstructed drifts
in the pause we interrogate
absorb take each other in
minerals interacting charged
open my eyes scene changed
crabs rotate
light shifts
you a shooting star
kiss my cheek lips wet
eyes shine
bright stars in our constellation
where to next
What Kind of Chat
Been thinking about language, what structures
of diction, syntax, grammar, punctuation
control how we touch with words
Learning Irish, finally freed from the forbidden
my parents endured, colonized education
left for dead but rising up as the people
theirselves keep doing, verb-driven
actions precede subject precede object
imagine the world without “yes” or “no”
What kind of chat begins with such useless
little words, too polarizing, too stagnant
isolated from the heart, the banter
needed to start the grand old conversation
a response followed by a few questions
or better, a story bursting with ancestors
Imagine a land where our tongues weave
an ogham for we are all poets, unbound
unleashed spring tides, they/them, us/we
Blue Fields
Let me begin again
As pitch pine loved
By wind of intense tones
Gently stroked by breeze
Blown sideways in blizzard
Our intimacy accompanied
By birdsong as I whisper
Deeply from long needles
Cry out from the shortest
A frenzy of sounds carved
Out of such still silence
Let me begin again
Walk blue fields with you