Natural History Lessons

This still-growing body of poems and illustrations draws upon fairy tales, nature, and science to tell stories of love, intersectional feminism, struggle, and defiance. These visual and verbal collages portray colorful, messy beauty and emotional complexity within and in opposition to the stark, violent landscape of the patriarchy, capitalism, and western culture. Please share with those that might benefit. ~Katrina

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August 12, 2023

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Heavy

January 13, 2024

Raspberry Patch Tesseract

February 19, 2023

A single taste of the precious jam on my tongue in Winter and I am here again. Sunglow green leaves, triads of midnight purple treasure, mingle with the scarlet unripe. Chalky lavender stems, studded with pale, mirthless thorns. A delicious smell, beyond words, cuts straight to the limbic. Lovingly lost here — the rhythm of fingers plucking, the pleasing patter in the pail. The brambly black raspberry patches around my parent’s house are a magical machine that folds layers of time back onto themselves, over and over, like berries swirled into sweet batter. All at once: I am a feral, bare-legged child, running wild with my sister, sweet tang in my mouth, a proud map of scratches on our legs announcing our fierce and united denial of pants. I am a young woman, my sister, pregnant and persistent as ever, her belly a great round berry. We plucked for hours, entranced, I almost forgot my class and was late, Later, she napped. I am middle-aged, deliciously ...

Imago Vertigo

January 27, 2023

You used to be all green segments neatly arranged in a perfect little row. Nubbins for legs, little orange Velcro hooks for toes. With such machinery and such control, you’d inch along — all day and all night. Beneath your bronze helmet, serrated mandibles, clacking chitinously, mindlessly macerating all leafy matter in your path. Frass burning out your ass — a nonstop energy extractor, a tireless wormy expander and contractor. Gross, Orderly, and Acceptable — You stuck to the contract. Kept the pact. Until, one day you blacked out. Woke up in a bag, a disorderly warm soup, a dizzy swirl. You felt viscerally (even without viscera) that to be suddenly Wormless and Formless was wholly unacceptable. How does the formless find form? In your terror, you tried force, you tried will, you tried plans and panic. Alas no, you stayed soupy and droopy. Then one day, just when you thought you were ...