Cat Batsios | Her | Poets Resist | Glass: A Journal of Poetry

Poets Resist
Edited by Catherine Chambers
April 19, 2017

Cat Batsios

Her

There's a woman who owns a junk shop & when there's a loose tile in the foyer, a piece of glass that looks like Detroit, she yelps. These cold crackle fragments rest in the tension of her palm; old guitar strings woven into a necklace, Virgin icon from the rear-view of the Buick she slept in, empty clementine crates storing spices & cups for Greek coffee, Dalmatian shells from a far off coast, snapshots of dirt & river water. Some days she's the kind of woman who, while she reads poetry in the afternoon, hires an artist of the tongue to perform cunnilingus. Other days she puts on a leather jacket, climbs into running bathwater because she's lonely & imagines that's how she came out of the womb. But really, no womb would ever have her, her gaze moves around my apartment twitching; the fridge kicking in, pieces of Carrera quarry shifting in an ashtray; she smells like cinnamon from Sullivan St. & cleans her teeth with an X-acto knife. I want to hit her with the brick from a Pittsburgh street I lived on once, tuck her into a cigar box, arrange her like a musicbox ballerina, pin her up with cast-iron nails pulled from a 19th-century church, or maybe ask her out for beers at some Bowery basement bar where she'll only order Michigan brews, one Two-Hearted after another. She is the one of us who still has paint in her hair, she still has that pair of jeans I wore working four years of set design, she's never had an abortion & never left the roof of the old Durant Hotel that night when we broke in to see the lights down Saginaw St. Her junk shop is somewhere near the Flint River where she catalogues, cleans & tells stories to her trinkets so I can hear stories again in that foreign tone someone who has never been a lover uses.

"Her" is one of the cardinal poems in a clump in progress collectively called Thalassaphobia (Gr. fear of the sea) titled such because I often think of my hometown (Flint, MI) as Atlantis. The Thalassophobia poems (after Jamaal May) focus on the after-effect of growing up in a place that was purposefully forgotten and left to decompose. Instead of going away, we accumulated treasure and rot on/in our body(ies) and as any other Flint kid could tell you there is much beauty and strength in to be found in what we've built and fight to keep alive. "Her" is litany, reflection, and actualization.