New Poetry by Kathryn Guelcher

Not Sleeping

Actually, I have many hearts
in circulation.
You have the only whole one.
New ones grow...
for song, guitar,
the beginning of each summer,
trips planned, taken.
These hearts sprout small
from very little:
platelets, plasma, 
longing, time, rain.
Tenderly, they grow and expect little,
and later fracture under loyalties.
But the large old heart you’ve got
has roots like the Yucca,
stretching for ground water
in the heat of the desert,
though here, definite seasons 
have blurry edges.
And like the Yucca, this heart of mine,
that is yours,
blooms certainly and silently,
if unpredictably,
and won’t be dug up.
The stems are phallic,
like so much else--
lightening bolts, this pen,
the imagined line between
your fingers
and the space bar you strike
between words
pulsing worlds, 
ideas...
of youth fading
of love lasting
of children, impossibly ours,
showing us, again and again, 
joy’s endless capacity for laughter.


- Kathryn Guelcher 2017

Kathryn Guelcher teaches English in the suburbs of Chicago at Carl Sandburg High School where she received a grant in 2013 and co-founded a Visiting Writer Series for students. Since first appearing in Bluepepper in 2012, her poetry has appeared in Lost Coast Review, Memoir Journal, Brev Spread, George Bilgere's Word Play, Orange Room Review, Fat City Review, yourdailypoem.com and more. Her husband and three children keep her laughing and are her favorite travel companions, Their cat, Big, is treated like a celebrity in the house-- and still manages to complain about it. Follow her on Twitter @KathrynGuelcher