The Intolerable Nature of Yearning

And now something from our sponsors... So, This is a Katie Kidder original. It was first published in Contrary Magazine in the fall of 2007 and is now here for your reading pleasure.

The Intolerable Nature of Yearning

I have been searching for you
as the mornings and the evenings scroll by in a mad collage of letters that want
to be your name.

I have looked in the phone book
and in Japanese. I found you thinly veiled in Freud's Illusion
just to lose you down a page of long division.
I watched my goldfish mouth you out a thousand times in spheres
that ascended slowly to the surface and then popped.
I have seen your name almost complete itself
in my husband's dirty socks.
I nearly licked you off
a whiskey label-- if I could swallow what you are
I would.

My friend, my friend who feels prettier
in her skull's long grin,
accused your terms of catching me like a fish
bone in the throat.

She laughed at me, smoked and puffed,
"A man who writes knows too much."*


*From Anne Sexton's "The Black Art"