Read More: A Brief Interview with Katherine Durham Oldmixon
Vespers
How evening blues before night
falls, dry sky turned a color of water
delicate as eggshells. For fifty-odd years,
at this hour katydids have hummed up
my summers, their call and chant
an insectual chorus: did they say
the knot on my heel is a spur?
My animal self, turned mineral;
every green year I become a layer
of salt spread beneath shell-thin skin
where rivers of veins surface
an azure tattoo. How will
this body read when I am bone?
May it be an earth psalm, runes
in the language of soil and rain.
When It Last Snowed
Once snow that lasted awhile fell here
crisp and light and crepuscular.
Not northern weather, it made no moans
or mounds but whispered as if the sky […]
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Katherine Durham Oldmixon’s recent poems can be found in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Solstice Literary Magazine, The Bellevue Review, The Normal School, and in her chapbook Water Signs, finalist for the New Women’s Voices Award (Finishing Line Press, 2009). Co-director of the Poetry at Round Top festival and a senior poetry editor for Tupelo Quarterly, Katherine holds a Ph.D. in English from UT-Austin, MFA in Creative Writing from University of New Orleans, M.A. and B.A. in English from University of Houston. Katherine is professor and chair of English at historic Huston-Tillotson University in Austin, TX, where she lives with her husband Arturo Lomas Garza.