Poetry: Flooded by Katherine Indermaur
Katherine Indermaurs series of triplets flex a considered and deliberate rhythm—let the syntax carry your reading into your body, the pauses and the rushing forward, the flooding of your sense of balance. Her poem meditates on grief and loss, the way feelings become verbs that can face the world, even if you can’t.
Flooded
for Cedar Brant
Gut-sad. Heart-sick.
Sinus swells, fills.
Fluid where air should be.
Our bodies are good
at commemorating, translating
feeling into flexed muscles
and appetite lost, exhaustion
and nausea, mucosal linings
let loose and spilling.
Our bodies aren’t sorry
for feeling. Sorry almost
a verb—like borrow, like carry.
I sorry at the mirror. Reflexive:
I sorry myself mid-morning.
We sorry for you, to you,
alongside and from you
to the whole flooded everywhere.
Katherine Indermaur
Katherine Indermaur is the author of the poetry chapbook Pulse (Ghost City Press, 2018). Her nonfiction and poetry have appeared in Alpinist, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, CALAMITY, Muse /A Journal, Poetry South, Voicemail Poems, and elsewhere. An MFA candidate at Colorado State University, where she won the 2018 Academy of American Poets Prize, she is the managing editor for Colorado Review. In her spare time, she enjoys rock climbing, skiing, petting dogs, teaching yoga, cooking, and eating.
