Whitney Kerutis is a poet from Arizona residing in Stillwater, Oklahoma. She is Managing Editor of GASHER Journal, Poetry Editor of Timber Literary Journal, and is a Ph.D. student in Creative Writing/Literature at Oklahoma State University. She received her MFA from the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is the 2017 poetry winner of the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards. Her work has appeared in journals such as Breakwater Review, Anamesa, WINDOW, Thought Erotic, and others.
Whitney Kerutis
from Song of Discordia
There is a script I am writing, rewriting, reciting
in order to get away from myself.
As if just there in your upturned palms, new pastoral
appears as a throat making negative sounds open
Whitney Kerutis
from Song of Discordia
There is a script I am writing, rewriting, reciting
in order to get away from myself.
As if just there in your upturned palms, a new pastoral
appears as a throat making negative sound open.
It’s never not been night.
My hands never not stretched before me, praying
to land on something immediately
recognized
Dear Alcestis,
You dressed yourself for your burial. I too have no cure for disaster. When he is taking me, someone takes me to a cave’s echo of what is to emerge from the darkness— which is to say, he takes me without any cleansing bowl, any sound of the beating of women’s hands. He passes me a note in the office cubicle that proposes we get a quickie in before the meeting. I pretend I can’t read his hand writing. When they brought you back from the dead, you weren’t addressable for three days. What am I but careful in the mornings not to touch any surface for a long while.
*“I too have no cure for disaster.” and “without any cleansing bowl, any sound of the beating of women’s hands.”: Variation of lines taken from Euripides, Alcestis
Dear Alcestis,
Being and not being are thought to be different things. In the apartment, I speak aloud the items I pull from the medicine cabinet so that my neighbors on the other side of the wall won’t worry I am dead. A woman gets sick on the bathroom floor at work and I think this is progress. It is and isn’t presence; It causes me the same sorrow. It is and isn’t the grieving O’ or finger re-aimed at when things became so laughably predestined.
*“Being and not being are thought to be different things.”: Euripides, Alcestis
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Whitney Kerutis
What are 2 - 3 books (regardless of genre) that you've read over the last year or less that really blew your hair back?
Mary Wants to Be A Superwoman by Erica Lewis
In the Language of My Captors by Shane McCrae
Map to the Stars by Adrian Matejka