kat hayes

Kat Hayes is Assistant Professor of English at Eastern University near Philadelphia. Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in several print and online publications including Black Lawrence Press, Ecotone, Cimarron Review, Salamander, Ruminate, Nimrod, and Off the Coast. She and her husband have two spirited daughters and two somnolent cats.

skunk hollow

After we were broken irreparably,

I went to the creek. I was always going

To creeks in the face of loss as if things

Might be mended there by geology.

Except I had no sense of place. I might

Have started with the remains of a mill

Nearby, three hundred years old and still.

No water bringing the wheel to life,

No wheat abraded by the pair of stones –

They lay in the sun turned upward like eyes.

The mill stood indifferent to time while

I tried to make sense of being alone.

I was trying to parse how we split

Like two limbs of a tree. I got nowhere.

Like sound, the blame ricocheted here, there –

Yes, we were hollow. Yes, we were careless.

It took time for me to get my bearings, 

But I kept coming back to this– the mill,

The creek, the stones kept apart by skill

Or luck, the wheel causing water to sing.

In theory, we could still go back and revise

the story: I gave you what I was able.

What you took from me was a miller’s toll – 

the portion of bread that kept you alive.

Read more of Kat’s work in Solum Journal Volume IV.