Lydia Golitz
Second Runner-up in the 2022 Greg Grummer Poetry Contest
Here is my desperate garden, my lease of sand and gravel.
Where Saint Catherine lies with her head off in the yellow dirt.
The dove from heaven who fed her once a day in exile
keeps arriving at my door. I cannot eat what he has to give me.
Honey ham and cantaloupe, roughage from a demolition.
It is all bathed in the same detestable, inedible blue light.
They said she was kind to unmarried girls and the knife sharpener.
The wasps in her hair are making more of themselves.
When they first tried to kill me, the wheel of torture snapped into a million pieces.
Today I purred at the television. Spat on myself to keep cool.
Lydia Golitz
was born and raised in Chicago and now lives in Los Angeles. In 2019, she was named a Bennington Undergraduate Writing Fellow in Poetry. Her work is published or forthcoming in Washington Square Review and Bat City Review.