Caroline Kanner
Winter 2026 | Poetry
Ablutions
It’s the end of the day and nobody
can say whether I’m near the end
of my life. On the other hand, nobody
can say for sure whether it will ever end.
This time of year everything
has something in its mouth. Everyone but me.
Clean, clean mouth. Hair, fish, foam
from the patio cushion the raccoon tore. Making
nests, feeding young. I’m watching a video
of a lady clutching the hawk that got into
her hutch. Giving the hawk
a talking to. I want to give me a talking to.
I don’t know what to talk about. The cat
of my mind bats its ball around its track.
Caroline Kanner is a writer and teacher from California. She has poems in or forthcoming from Bat City Review, Denver Quarterly, Peripheries, and the math textbook Fractal Worlds: Grown, Built, and Imagined, among other places. She co-founded and edits Some Creek Press (somecreekpress.net).