I Wonder What I Would’ve Been in Another Life

by Kait Quinn


Hair still straight as a show horse's mane, I tolerate
another one of my husband's monotoned textbook
facts about space to completely obliterate the nebulaic
watercolor wreckage, spilt-merlot magic of it all.

The cicadas drone on beyond their ghosts
of spun copper, and I am a hot spring on a summer
day, boiling myself to ash 'til I have no skin to bristle
at his touch, no tongue to slip around the boulder

of his name. My only solace is my in-laws' Hill
Country house, out where blue skies yawn
over wine-stained roses, sunsets like valencia
fresh squeezed over cattled acres. I take over

the guest house to write poems lacking the urgency
of migration, solitary flights across the Atlantic,
Eve gnawing the pomegranate, the fig, then bathing
in the plasmic juices. Instead, I write odes to a man who

made my twenties a toxic bath, gave me babies—my babies
I'd bleed out for!—then made me raise them under
patriarchal law: blue for boys, pink for girls,
red drowning us all in a swimming pool filled

with my own ink blood. I collect them—
these clandestine love letters to myself—into a manuscript
I never get the nerve to publish because he might read them.
I rip each one to pieces, spread them out across the country

house that might someday be mine if I am velveteen good,
wildflower patient. A few here, beneath the floorboard
under the reading chair he never uses. There, in the cobwebbed
nook between two yellow bricks inside the hearth

it never gets cold enough in Texas to light. I scatter the rest
in the field, plant them like seeds I nourish into courage.
Bright Easter eggs for the daughter I covertly raise
under the wilds of Lilith to someday dig up, mismatch

into a story where I didn't stay but ran
barefoot home to the woods, moved to the mountains,
then the desert, flew alone to Budapest, and the only blood
I gave was to the poetry and the mockingbird, the crown

on my wrist, rubber band heart stretched from ulnar
to radial artery. Or, I bury them like the dead, drain the crimson
from my body, walk my inherited cemetery a pale morning
corpse. Art is all I have and even that, too, is dissolving.


* * * * *

Kait Quinn (she/her) was born with salt in her wounds. She flushes the sting of living by writing poetry. She is the author of four poetry collections, and her work appears in Reed Magazine, Watershed Review, Chestnut Review, and elsewhere. She received first place in the 2022 John Calvin Rezmerski Memorial Grand Prize. Kait is an Editorial Associate at Yellow Arrow Publishing and a poetry reader for Black Fox Literary Magazine. She enjoys repetition, coffee shops, tattoos, and vegan breakfast. Kait lives in Minneapolis with her partner, their regal cat, and their very polite Aussie mix. Find her at kaitquinn.com.