Kathleen McGookey ~ In My Hometown Library

I sat with a poet I loved like a father, read­ing poems. They were my poems, and I want­ed to know what to do. Let me say this kind of dream has nev­er come to me before. I passed man­u­script pages to the poet I loved like a father, and he passed them back to me. Mostly, he said yes. The rest of the dream was like the motion of deer cross­ing a dirt road at twi­light, like clouds rush­ing ahead of a storm. We sat in cushy arm­chairs by a gas fire­place, and gold­en light flick­ered across his glass­es. The librar­i­an with red hair came by and asked us to join the famous poet whose read­ing was just now start­ing. Why not? my friend said, and held out his hand to help me onto the stage.

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Kathleen McGookey has pub­lished four books of prose poems and three chap­books, most recent­ly Instructions for My Imposter (Press 53) and Nineteen Letters (BatCat Press). She has also pub­lished We’ll See, a book of trans­la­tions of French poet Georges Godeau’s prose poems. Her work has appeared in Copper Nickel, December, Field, Glassworks, Miramar, Ploughshares, Quiddity, The Southern Review, and Sweet. She has received grants from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. This past win­ter, she became an alpine ski instructor.