Katherine Riegel
What Life is Like Here on Earth
Some days you wake up and something tiny happens—
you stub your toe on the way to the bathroom
or watch a starving pit bull in one of those awful social media
videos that usually has a happy ending but still syphons
a few minutes of your dear attention and leaves you
with that skinny-sad-dog image branded onto your brain—
and the rest of the day is ruin. You remember how lonely
you are and blame it on your blue-eyed sister dead
from cancer at fifty-eight and maybe it is that,
or maybe it’s the juvenile hawk crying and crying
as he flies over the neighborhood, maybe it’s your body
throwing another flamboyant fit of ache and fatigue
so you won’t be able to plant the wild strawberries
again. Those days your sloppy tears keep coming
back and the phlegm clogs your throat and you blow
your nose til it’s raw, tell yourself to buck up, the sun’s out
and you don’t want to get a sinus headache, do you?
Those days you scrabble around for an antidote
to your exile, research co-housing, fantasize
about gathering a posse of good people to buy
an English manor house and live there together,
filling that old library with eclectic books, walking out
on the lawn like you’re wearing empire waist dresses
instead of the roomy jeans and sweatshirts you always
choose. Those days you wait like a dog at the door
for the thing to happen that makes you
forget or reject your loneliness, the thing that doesn’t offer
your joints a salve or show your sister in heaven
but happens anyway, without fanfare,
so when you go to bed that night you look at yourself
in the mirror and have to remember why
your eyelids are swollen and your head wool-stuffed,
and you know you made it through another one of those days
still carrying the tin cup you hold out to the world
hoping for something sweet.
My Entrance to the Otherworld is in Illinois
Hawthorns ruled the slope we called The Wild Area,
a green mess from the west side of the house down
to the horse pasture. I loved this space
because my father couldn’t tame it,
and when I scrambled under the blackberry canes
and crawled on hands and knees into that breathing shadow
I was untamed too. I never feared those fairy tale thorns,
but I never touched the sharp points
with my fingertip, either. I was so young I thought
hawthorns only grew on our farm, bloomed only
so my mother could lean out the upstairs window
and say, My! Smell that, will you?
We drove away
in the spring, my father too afraid
of the life the rest of us loved. Four kids,
ten to eighteen, and a wife who hoped
this sacrifice might finally blunt his anger.
My secret heart remains there, impaled,
caught between that old world of true stories
and this one I have come to fear
made of metal and glass and humming wires
to swallow wind and leaves alike.
Do those hawthorns still open their fists of wild
blossoms each spring, casting the scent that could take me
through the gate and home? Once upon a time
we drove away, I begin. But that is all I know.
She Couldn’t Understand My Words but I Still Wish I Could Unsay Them
When she was young, my dog found a severed
wing at the off-leash park and ran away with it,
finally splashing into a shallow pond, knowing
I wouldn’t follow. I don’t know why I was so angry.
As if that oar of the air belonged to some kind
of angel, gristle and all. When our mother
told us four kids to jump we knew the right response
was How high? Yet she gave us so much freedom
to roam the fields of our rural neighborhood
and decline to attend Sunday School
that when we didn’t behave
her wrath was sharp and cold as quartz
and her disappointment one of those tricks
where someone sets you up to fall
backwards over an obstacle. On your ass,
face hot, you had so much to manage
you didn’t think to rage back—except our oldest
brother, the one who became a lawyer. Once
he and Mom tried to storm out the same door
and got wedged there for a second, just long enough
they both had to laugh. I did not believe
I wanted a dog to command, a pseudo-child
trained, like I had been, to obey. Maybe I wanted
fairy tale pets so graceful and kind they always
made life easier. But no, I’ve cleaned up
enough shit and vomit to know real animals
aren’t two-dimensional bluebirds perching on your
shoulder, no matter how much Mom loved
that old Disney song—zippity doo dah!—she sang
while paddling a canoe or picking raspberries,
happy. When my dog dawdled in that muddy water
I said, Fine. I don’t love you anymore and turned
my back. Of course that was the trick: walk away
and love will follow, wild and wayward as an angel
who has lost a wing but still hovers just out of sight.
Katherine Riegel’s lyric memoir, Our Bodies Are Mostly Water, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press in 2025. She is also the author of Love Songs from the End of the World (Main Street Rag), the chapbook Letters to Colin Firth (Sundress), and two more books of poetry. Her work has appeared in Brevity, Catamaran, One, Orion and elsewhere. She is managing editor of Sweet Lit and teaches online classes in poetry and cnf. Find her at katherineriegel.com.
