Speech Therapy

Kate Nitze

SPEECH THERAPY

 
 
Stand before your square of scorched earth,
           purple-brown and lined with succulents,
in not quite the right kind of shoes
 
and you will be
           nonetheless
           majestic.
 
In this plot adjacent to the chlorine smell
           of motels in the off-season,
a comical palm chitters in the gusts.
 
How busy you are with the mundane,
           yet life-saving routines of sucking straws—
various widths, descending notes.

Alone at an L-shaped table, the smallest piece
           teeters on the edge
           of a pathway meant for air.
 
What flit of bird
           turn of weather
           far-off shouts of schools opening?
 
You could be a canal. You could be
           an industrious, muddied channel, just
a way toward, never simply there.
 
Or quiet and frozen like an alpine lake in January.
           But you climb into an empty box,
particled and always with artificial light.
 
           The glare, really,
           of white skies too hot.
 
           So you heed the gestures of a sloping fence,
                      a flapping tarp. Up, up, and the soot
becomes dirt. You see it there, transforming.
 
Fold over, lower down into this suburban sunset,
           a manila envelope around your rectangular home,
flat and familiar,
           with a softening at one wet corner.

Kate Nitze is an editor, educator, and hospice caregiver in San Francisco. She has an MFA in poetry from the University of Montana. Her work has appeared in Ninth Letter and Bone Bouquet, and received a commendation for the 2017 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine.