Cathleen Cohen
We watch your body simplify
into its bones, its structures
as in wax sculpture
before it’s cast.
It’s taken months,
this carving away.
Your eyes burn blue like kiln fire.
Your voice is cloth.
Never before have we listened
so intently, but waiver
the edge of your pride,
your self-containment. Even now
you collapse, fold in
like an easel
elegant, angled, refusing
touch.
***
Cathleen Cohen was the 2019 Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, PA. Her poems have appeared in Apiary, Baltimore Review, Cagibi, Chrysalis Journal, East Coast Ink, 6ix, North of Oxford, Philadelphia Stories, Ritualwell, Rockvale Review, and “Camera Obscura” (Moonstone Press, 2017, chapbook). “Etching the Ghost” (Atmosphere Press) is upcoming in 2021.