[THE FAILURE OF TIME REPOSSESSES ITS MEANING]

weakness on weakness
sickness on sickness
sex etiolated
is suspect

I chose repletion not for
comfort but for ending

in these moments
you were a snake
capable of unhinging
with a cartoonish appetite
falseness of intimacy
complicated into a book

something
was meant
to go wrong
despite our efforts
to make it right

it is such a pleasure
to spend time with you
to take this excerpt
to plunge
my hands
into soil
your hands
have already
worked over

I would write
I can’t tolerate this
anymore
the bridge desire
creates between
mundanity and
a dream

I stand at the center
a decision contending
with immobility. The position
it takes is not over
when it is. I don’t lip
I want you now. I mumble
you smell good to me. Like a
darkroom. I don’t say
I love you. I say
I will linger
on that bridge

[THE OBSESSION OF FORGETTING]

is a byproduct
of ancestral
alcoholism
Alzheimer’s
neo-hippy gentleness
psycho-pharm
millennia

my father talked
about generational divide
Vietnam versus silence

unconditional
has messed up
my expectations

I see this pantingly
while eating my eggs

what about
the hormonal load?
the fact
I am ovulating
makes no difference

do sharks prefer the fertile?

ending up on the floor
I was crawling up your leg
you could have
hosed me down
to ward me away
like a toddler
I told you how
I shit myself during
the Detroit affair
bodily responsiveness
coming back to language

libraries make you
shit
books make you
shit
I worried about
incontinence in the car
on the drive to Dauphine
ripping through
stopped up in time
I felt sick attempting
to document myself

K-K-K-Katie
Beautiful Katie
you’re the only g-g-girl
that I adore
when the m-m-Moon shines
over the c-c-cowshed
I’ll be waiting at the k-k-k-kitchen door

as a child
you stammered
I am stammering now

I am not safe with you
you are not safe

[TO BE COMPLETE INVOLVES TITRATION]

a state of
permissibility

I am in a higher tier
than expected
an inheritance
of white
collared workers
ignoring the restrictions
of immigration
in their enclave

I found my own
not in nation
something worse
an access
to certain
inaccessible things
certain ways of being
that make it so
I am kept in a sphere
I attempted to reject
my safety is in thinning
my safety is in a massacre
my safety
my safety
my ignorance
my wrecked nervous system
my compliancy

I disrobe
to something
dejectable

I was not a brilliant child
I was a memory
of some lost apex
an unreadiness
lineage
that line
a silver vein
a link between
beauty and survival
a path enforced
to be discerned
the path is religious
the path is a crucible

Katie Ebbitt is a poet/psychotherapist living in NYC. She is the author of the chapbooks ANOTHER LIFE (Counterpath, 2016), Para Ana (Inpatient, 2019), Air Sign (Creative Writing Department, 2024) and HYSTERICAL PREGNANCY (above/ground press, 2024). Fecund, her first full-length book will be released by Keith LLC in September 2024.