Poetry: “She Introduces Herself As Katie” by Sheree La Puma
Sheree La Puma’s poem, “She Introduces Herself As Katie,” has a physicality to its weird music, a kind of pulsing rhythm that immediately evokes the body and its sometimes conflicting desires. Ambiguity and tension are hard at work in this poem, and there are many moments when the reader must stop and think about her implications, but the thudding heart of the poem remains true regardless of whether, as readers, we dive headlong into the upside down world that La Puma has creates, or if we keep a more reserved and safe emotional distance. Either way, the poem has a way of worming itself into a reader’s memory, with not only a long shelf-life but connections and echoes that reverberate all through the lives that La Puma has crossed paths with—but our own lives, now, too.
She Introduces Herself As Katie
Like a wise pilgrim on a journey to a birthplace.
Daughter, your name stamped in concrete
alongside a Portuguese bungalow, moss green.
Your fingers. Your toes. Your voice heavy with
autumn. There is no hot water. No lamp. No light.
The room I once slept in now has one less wall.
The fourth is a clear sheet of plastic – rolled up during
the day & dropped at night. A temporary freedom in
a march towards the mountains. You are a ghost
merging through a wormhole. Your father felled like
a wingless bird. I’ve been asked to take his place. It
is here among death that I come to grieve, among
substance & nothingness, comradery, & solitude.
Love has not been good to me. I lost myself
in mother. I gave my husband everything – except
desire. The scent of blood & skin, the wine, the smoke.
the weight of shame proved too much. I slashed my
thigh with scissors. I slept with people I did not know.
I bought myself a pair of carbon fiber poles to assist
my aging knees & still, I disappointed people.
Because I thought the rustling in the undergrowth
might be a bear – I injured myself running in the dark.
Gravel tumbling under bare feet. You thought it might
have been wild boar instead. They are common on this
stretch of the Camino. This quest. This path. I was hot,
cold, wet & sometimes miserable, yet strangely content.
Now that you are gone, I almost ask for forgiveness.
Sheree La Puma
Sheree La Puma is a writer and recent cancer survivor whose work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Lake Effect: An International Literary Journal, The Penn Review, Redivider, Sugar House Review, The Maine Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, London Reader, The Lascaux Review, Salt Hill Literary Journal, Stand Magazine, Rust + Moth, Mantis, and Catamaran Literary Reader, among others. She earned her MFA in writing from CalArts. Her poetry has been nominated for Best of The Net and four Pushcarts. A reader for the Orange Blossom Review, her chapbook, Broken: Do Not Use, is currently available at Main Street Rag Publishing.
