Poetry by Colleen S. Harris
Animalia
As a child I was a small skulk
of foxes, a careful canine
nipping into momentary
patches of sun, ducking
into shadow in a house built
of storms. Foxes use magnetic
fields to judge distance
and direction before a jump,
the way a young girl measures
the air pressure of adults’ ambient
rage before asking for new shoes.
I turned into a teen tiding
of magpies, collecting shiny
keys of escape: golden good
grades, silver scholarship string.
In my twenties a quiver of cobras,
a rhumba of rattlesnakes drunk
on my own venom, new rattle added
each time I shed skin and accent
to be someone new, warning hic
sunt dracones and ego sum draco.
At forty-five, I am an ambush
of tigers. Black inked into my skin,
nails always in carmine, hot-flash
red. I overheat easy and am content
to swim in cool waters, but I stay
wary the way even lazy cats do.
To Be Read While Listening to Tanaka’s “Korobeiniki”
There is an entire cast of men, and boys,
I never knew in my father. I never knew
him as the child who had to throw a drunk
mother into the shower before a drunk father
came home to beat them all. I knew the man
who drank cases of Meister Braü when budgets
were tight, Budweiser from bottles when wallets
were flush, and St. Pauli Girl when his older
brother came to visit and whip up his temper.
I never knew the boy who bewitched smart
young girls into doing his homework, never
met the youth who wrote my mother letters
from the belly of an aircraft carrier crawling
the Indian Ocean. I knew the man who mocked
a young girl for her love of books, who wanted
union foreman pay but not the study it required,
who thought nothing of his fifteen-year-old
daughter earning Cornell correspondence
course A’s in Labor Relations while he drank
on the job and she typed his name at the top
of her page. And I knew a mercurial man
who waited until his frugal wife was away
buying milk to pack three bewildered kids into
a Pontiac T1000 and drive to the toy store where
he bought a brand-new Nintendo. Console, two
controllers, and a pile of shoot-em-up games,
Duck Hunt, Hogan’s Alley. And on top of the pile:
Tetris, because he knew I loved puzzles, to make
jagged pieces fit, to avoid being crushed while
my world grew fast and frantic and out of control.
Colleen S. Harris earned the MFA in Writing from Spalding University. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her poetry collections include The Light Becomes Us (forthcoming 2025), Babylon Songs (forthcoming 2026), These Terrible Sacraments (2011, 2019), The Kentucky Vein (2010), God in My Throat: The Lilith Poems (2009), and chapbooks Toothache in the Bone (forthcoming 2025), That Reckless Sound (2014), and Some Assembly Required (2014). Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Berkeley Poetry Review, The Louisville Review, Cider Press Review, and more than 70 others. She goes by ‘warmaiden’ on Instagram, Bluesky, and Twitter. Her author website is https://colleensharris.com
Arcturus 