Katherine Soniat

Broth

The night he dies I dream of riding boxcars,

the sparks flying.

Hear the bells     the crossing gates

coming down?

Red Xs stitch my eyes      shut.

Never has a conductor faltered so oddly.

Hills roll by in tired profile like the hours

he lay back    pushing away

spoons of hot golden soup.

Katherine Soniat's eighth collection of poems, Polishing the Glass Storm, came out from LSU Press (2022). Her ninth collection, Starfish Wash-up, was recently published by Etruscan Press in 2023. Bright Stranger was published in 2016 (LSU PRESS). The Goodbye Animals in 2014 was awarded the Turtle Island Chapbook Prize. A Shared Life won the University of Iowa Poetry Prize and The Swing Girl (LSU Press) was selected as Best Collection of Year by the North Carolina Poetry Council. Notes of Departure was selected for The Camden Poetry Prize by the Walt Whitman Center for the Arts & Humanities in 1984. New & Selected: Authority (Poems, 1985-2025) was recently completed and includes nine collections and a group of new poems.