Kate Northrop
Summer 2025 | Poetry
Finished
Swimming is finished. In the
hall, we wait forever
and swimming gets pulled
from the water, like a sneaker.
Now if I remember the phone
attached to a kitchen wall
and it has the look
of hay drying in sun,
then it was just a phone.
If swimming is finished,
the phone is finished.
If the phone is finished,
ringing is. If once
we walked on a sidewalk
side by side, swayed
like a bank of windows
thrown inside
by the setting sun, now
we are waiting, now are
the face of the front door,
long, holding onto itself,
like a bell toll.
Kate Northrop’s recent poetry collections are “Homewrecker” (New Letters vol 88, 2022) and “cuntstruck” (C & R Press, 2017). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Glacier, Plume, Revel, SWWIM and Terrain. She is the recipient of the Jeanette Haein Ballard Writers Award, the Paumanok Poetry Award, the Wick Poetry Award, an New York Times Book Review Editors Choice and fellowships from Yaddo and MacDowell. She teaches at the University of Wyoming.