A Temporary Stay

~ after “Sojourn” by Andrea Kowch

It’s not the wild hair, or the white farm turkey, 
or the butterfly nets filled with wind, or even 

the ruffles on the pretty dresses. It’s not the black 
swallowtail butterflies landing on the big heads 

of Queen Anne’s lace, not the lace collars 
that the sisters wear. It’s the open window  

on the second story of the house behind them where 
I pause. The curtain billows out of it, like the nets, 

blowing the same direction. The yellow fields match 
the yellow hair, aglow, already lifting off into the sky. 

It’s a scene between seasons, on the cusp of change, 
waiting. The last of something. Like us, it’s impermanent 

—the girls will go back inside later, the wind will die down,
the day will draw to its end, the window will close. 

The butterflies will alight to a different field. We will all 
leave soon enough. Let us sojourn here a little while longer.  

Filleting a Fried Trout 

(Ars Poetica)

At the base of the tail 
slip the last tine of your fork beneath
the speckled skin, crispy now and then 
slit it toward the head, to peel back the skin.
See the white meat in small neat trapezoids.
Take the fork; use the tool. Look at the fish 
on its plate, perpendicular to your own face.
Gently, gently, press the fork tines into
the fillet’s centerline, inviting the meat away 
from the bones. Then, the other side. All this
for the reward of the spine.
Lift the delicate tail, like a petal, like lace, 
carefully, carefully, just enough so that 
each fine fish bone slips singularly away from 
the bottom fillet. Now you have a small skeleton, 
something that looks to belong in a natural 
history museum, not your trash can.  
Hold it up. See the beauty in the symmetry 
of the bones, even in the spaces between 
the bones, in the way it all holds together
after being caught and cooked and picked clean.

KATIE KALISZ

Katie Kalisz is a professor in the English Department at Grand Rapids Community College. Quiet Woman, her first book, was a finalist for the 2018 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Midwestern Gothic, The Michigan Poet, Red Paint Hill, Muddy River Poetry Review, and Unbroken Journal, among other publications.