Kate Schapira
4 poems
**
Drydock
Beautiful strangers from the moment
you set foot, and the windows are high.
Voyage hauled off indefinitely
the authentic timbers of arrival
don't reassure. Decision has passed
like trash on the water. To be sure
you have really traveled you look
up, then down. Suckers
under beautiful stars.
**
The Reluctant Saint
...Although he had to wear Soft Clothing and live in a Palace because of his Rank, he stayed very poor and humble inside, so as to be as much like a Hermit as he could Notwithstanding... Thrilled into a pink top. His dad said, "Get him out of that." He went through the motions of shedding. Sainthood is next to the skin. Unwrapping, unpacking, rising from a nest of materials, the bewilderment of a new appliance.
**
The Saint of Nerves
"How Very Kind of God to make me so I couldn't say Mass when I'd got a Mortal Sin!" The parts that we pluck out are feathered, those that offend us callused. Misdeeds live in the roots of the nerves. If you believe that, a tender extraction is impossible. A lameness, a loss of motion, if you believe that, has exact correspondence. Press desires into your skin or cup them or fan them out, no one but you dictates their consistency; but that's what a saint can't afford to believe.
**
The Saint of True Forms
He took off his Rich and Rare Prime Minister's clothes and put on very Plain ones. Being a boy can disappear. If one's impossible the other has to be true. But the one they told him was true feels impossible and the one they told him was impossible high-stepping, padded out, careful application along and above the eye. Stories are full of women who dress as boys: the saints call them brave, canny, welcome them in. The greater the boyhood, the greater the need.
**
return to sawbuck 1.5
**
Kate Schapira is the author of a poetry chapbook, Phoenix Memory (horse less press, 2007). Her work has most recently appeared or will soon appear in Coconut, Word for/Word, The Diagram, No Tell Motel, Absent, Shampoo and Ecopoetics. She teaches writing and literature in Rhode Island and curates the Publicly Complex reading series in Providence.
**
Drydock
Beautiful strangers from the moment
you set foot, and the windows are high.
Voyage hauled off indefinitely
the authentic timbers of arrival
don't reassure. Decision has passed
like trash on the water. To be sure
you have really traveled you look
up, then down. Suckers
under beautiful stars.
**
The Reluctant Saint
...Although he had to wear Soft Clothing and live in a Palace because of his Rank, he stayed very poor and humble inside, so as to be as much like a Hermit as he could Notwithstanding... Thrilled into a pink top. His dad said, "Get him out of that." He went through the motions of shedding. Sainthood is next to the skin. Unwrapping, unpacking, rising from a nest of materials, the bewilderment of a new appliance.
**
The Saint of Nerves
"How Very Kind of God to make me so I couldn't say Mass when I'd got a Mortal Sin!" The parts that we pluck out are feathered, those that offend us callused. Misdeeds live in the roots of the nerves. If you believe that, a tender extraction is impossible. A lameness, a loss of motion, if you believe that, has exact correspondence. Press desires into your skin or cup them or fan them out, no one but you dictates their consistency; but that's what a saint can't afford to believe.
**
The Saint of True Forms
He took off his Rich and Rare Prime Minister's clothes and put on very Plain ones. Being a boy can disappear. If one's impossible the other has to be true. But the one they told him was true feels impossible and the one they told him was impossible high-stepping, padded out, careful application along and above the eye. Stories are full of women who dress as boys: the saints call them brave, canny, welcome them in. The greater the boyhood, the greater the need.
**
return to sawbuck 1.5
**
Kate Schapira is the author of a poetry chapbook, Phoenix Memory (horse less press, 2007). Her work has most recently appeared or will soon appear in Coconut, Word for/Word, The Diagram, No Tell Motel, Absent, Shampoo and Ecopoetics. She teaches writing and literature in Rhode Island and curates the Publicly Complex reading series in Providence.
