AT LARGE by Katherine Soniat

in The Thinking Republic

The winged-warrior pathologies 
antiquely arranged are meant to stay.     Why blame old cartographer 
for plans on water?                        Or latter-day men who came 
to want more and more of the land—scratching Earth hard 
after wealth?

So what if separations (of fiefdoms, dynasties, and the family pigs) 
become the elephantine question?    

It’s that large and clumsy—an uncomfortably wrinkled guest 
in the sleeping chamber, the west gallery, or great hall 
of dripping meats.  
However you see it, Big Gray is present as we suck grease from our fingers, 
and yell for more.

BIO: Katherine Soniat’s eighth collection of poems—Polishing the Glass Storm—will be published by LSU Press in 2022. Bright Stranger was published in 2016 by that same press. The Goodbye Animals was awarded the 2014 Turtle Island Chapbook Award. A Shared Life won the Iowa Poetry Prize and The Swing Girl (LSU Press) was selected as Best Collection of 2011 by the North Carolina Poetry Council. Her poems have appeared in the Denver Quarterly, Women’s Review of Books, Iowa Review, Poetry, Superstition Review, and The Nation, among others. Visit her at http://www.katherinesoniat.com Read an interview here