Kate Garrett


Unkithing


I watch the moon wax and the year wane –
concentric circles and turning gears, edges
of dawn and dusk pull each other closer
to wrap our days in an indigo cloak lined
with midnight. I stop to look across the city
from my hillside. Those lights twinkle up
at me all year long, but in the sharp night
they’ve grown spikes – in winter each life
is trimmed with ice. I’m considering mirrors.
Perhaps I don’t charge enough for manic
pixie wisdom, for happy accidents, when I

fit into this role and break out of it again –
but I still think I owe him something:
cigarettes, a drink, an apology. We still wish
on stars when the night sky is clouded over.
There is a calm in the way no expectation
follows a secret desire spoken aloud – how
it feels to wake to a world made silent by
snow. It’s a kind of disappearing: gaps in our
conversation, a stretch from hour to week
to the day when the moon enters Gemini. Then
here he is – with hands open, wearing a new tune.

 *unkithing – an old Scots word (pre-1700) meaning ‘failing to make oneself known’.




Kate Garrett is a writer, editor, mama, drummer, and history & folklore obsessive who sometimes haunts 450-year-old houses. Her poetry is widely published online and in print, and her next book, A View from the Phantasmagoria, is forthcoming from Rhythm & Bones Press in October 2020. Born and raised in rural southern Ohio, Kate moved to England in 1999, where she still lives halfway up a Sheffield hillside. www.kategarrettwrites.co.uk

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