Katherine Smith

Katherine Smith’s recent poetry publications include appearances in Southern Review, Boulevard, North American Review, Ploughshares, Mezzo Cammin, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, and many other journals. Her short fiction has appeared in Fiction International and Gargoyle. Her first book Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House) appeared in 2003. Her second book of poems Woman Alone on the Mountain (Iris Press), appeared in 2014. Her third book, Secret City, appeared with Madville Press in 2022. She works at Montgomery College in Maryland.

REPETITION

Your daughter climbed down from the pear tree.
Days like the green bowls, blue glassware
of Morandi repeat themselves. You yearn

for change that arrives slow as dripping water. At thirteen
your daughter has her first panic attack,
which repeats every September 11th for twenty years.

Then suddenly she has a job and a life.
When you walk downtown to revisit the ‘’Blast Off
of the Apollo” in Alma Thomas’s painting

on loan from the Air and Space Museum,
you understand only an artist could paint a rocket
over and over, as lovingly as a child being bathed.

You remember bathing your own daughter
during the Gulf war, how she tipped up her chin
and shut her eyes while you rinsed the shampoo

poured warm water through her hair,
then trundled her into her pajamas,
read her Good Night Moon night after night.