Noir
All the animals in the garden
knew the score: Rat knew,
Gnu knew, even Gnat
knew Snake was telling me
what to do. Snake whispered,
he lisped; he said I was
an ignorant bimbo, he said
I was expendable, a rib.
Snake was a reptile and he
was a pigeon, too.
He offered me the apple;
what could I do?
Kathleen Winter’s first book, Nostalgia for the Criminal Past, won the Antivenom Poetry Prize and was published by Elixir Press in 2012. Her poems are forthcoming in Tin House, Sentence, New American Writing, and Studio (U.K.). Her work has appeared in 32 Poems, AGNI, The New Republic, FIELD, Memorious, VOLT, Barrow Street, Anti- and The Cincinnati Review. Kathleen grew up in Texas and graduated from the MFA program at Arizona State in 2011. She teaches at the University of San Francisco.