"Power Lines" by Katherine Soniat

Katherine Soniat

Katherine Soniat

Katherine Soniat’s seventh collection, Bright Stranger, is forthcoming from Louisiana State University Press in spring 2016. The Goodbye Animals, recently received the Turtle Island Quarterly Chapbook Award and will be published by Foothills Press this December. The Poetry Council of North Carolina selected The Swing Girl (LSU Press) as Best Collection of 2011 and A Shared Life won the Iowa Poetry Prize. Work appears in World Poetry Portfolio #60, Saint Katherine Review, Hotel Amerika, storySouth, Prairie Schooner (Waterfusion),and Connotations Press. Previously on the faculty on at Hollins University and Virginia Tech, she teaches in the Great Smokies Writers Program at UNC-Asheville.

Power Lines

Had those stockings not slipped from her legs in the small 
hours of the morning, 
                                                 there would not have been hair 
come lose for him to touch like a favored summer doll's.

Now she reads the account, 
his metered frames of (how he frames) her.

 

Multiple exposures of night on a bed.

 

His what-he-says-she-said.
                                                  Those lines, 
and the spaces between. 

Space: stars and planets vanish as he decides he was taken in.
Line: “. . . of her men, I know that bed the best.”

 

His last lines, an end-rhyme-“joined at the groin”-      
seems surgical at best.