Katharyn Howd Machan

Somehow I Always Knew

church wine would never be mine. I was raised on purple grape juice— or, let me say, the lust for it, me in my sober navy dress, flat shoes, my grandmother shoving me into hymns while she readied her thighs to rise. I had to remain alone on the hard wooden pew devoid of sinful cushions that shaped other churches’ prayers for soul’s redemption. But how I longed for God’s permission to stand and step and kneel and taste sweet forgiveness on my tongue after what my little body had allowed a devil grandson to do to it, and me so very young.

Katharyn Howd Machan

Katharyn Howd Machan

Sunday Morning, Key West

Sean’s brought us hot Cuban coffee from where the locals go; I offer chocolate-filled croissants from Fausto’s warmed on a small white sturdy plate. Elizabeth Street: Nancy Forrester’s tall gumbo limbo shading her yard, pink bicycle, smooth orchids hanging. Steve is working in the back, carrying parrots one by one to rest on perches in safe cages the hawks and snakes can’t reach.

For eighteen years The Secret Garden has opened its gate on Free School Lane to offer this island’s last green acre of land beyond world’s metal greed. In twenty days that gate will be locked by the man who’s slathered this city with gold, declaring development divine as he destroys what’s sacred. Tomorrow, what will I say to the others who’ll gather with me to write stories and poems expecting a lasting haven of palms, roots deep in mulch, seeds ripe to rise? Sometimes the devil has God’s blue eyes when he flies in as smiling savior, promising rescue, paying time’s taxes, offering thin and holy lies … Sunday morning. Key West. A rooster crows; a small cat wanders; con leche in our cups is strong. Dede pours us peach and mango juice from the organic co-op. How to face the shape of darkness without letting its shadow in? Nancy’s surviving. We’ll work to survive. Holding on to why she lives: nurture of blue and crimson wings, replenishment of good black earth.

Katharyn Howd Machan

Myrrh and Cinnamon Are in the Fairy Tale

but my daughter chose cocaine instead and heroin in midnight’s cry for her phoenix nest of what she loved or what she felt she needed. Maybe she thought if she could burn her father’s ghost would turn to smoke, his fingers as he reached for her thin fragments of wide dream. Maybe she thought she could be the egg my love had tried to save and shape beyond the shadow of the man who’d raped me towards her breath. Ashes tinged with sharp tomorrow. Ashes dark with all hope fled. My beautiful child so close to living. My heart’s rose the shape of sorrow. Bird, bird, vast mythical bird promising new flaming flight can rise from what this fluttering world knows is truly dead.