Two Poems by Katherine Rauk

“Elegy”

I broke against the prow of his chest
like a champagne bottle boiling with tears.
What I wouldn’t have done to change

the color of the sky, clouds cut like cliffs
of salt. Or to taste the noise
the moon makes as it slides without trace

through sea. He only wanted to touch
the keys. As if the song was something
light could not pass through or leave.

“Portrait of My Lover as a Tutu”

You are the white froth
that shushes the edge of the shore

where seagulls get drunk on whatever it is
seagulls get drunk on

as the moon twirls in the unseen
wings of the night’s stage

like the ghost of a macaroon
I once melted on my tongue.

Katherine Rauk is the author of the chapbook Basil (Black Lawrence Press 2011), and has poems published in Harvard Review, Georgetown Review, Harpur Palate, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. Her poems have been choreographed by dancers as part of Sandbox Theatre’s word/move project as well as performed by the musicians of the Willamette Jazz Collective. Rauk is an assistant editor of Rowboat: Poetry in Translation and teaches at North Hennepin Community College in Minnesota.