by Kate Beck
Golden Shovel after Ross Gay’s Inciting Joy: Essays
**Landscape orientation suggested for phone reading**
It’s like you puke up thousands
on thousands of
double-stuffed oreos, the ones that cracked open like birds
from your fingers, taking
splintered icing between their wings in flight.
And you held them all in,
breaking at your brain, squeezing at my
hand, pumping at your chest.
Warning signs of what the
shaking mess would look like, long
strings of worry beading through your hair and
into my fingernails, the beautiful
aching and then the breaking
of everything we thought was over into
another something
that we don’t understand, no more
trying, excusing, waiting, we’re hungrier than
we were last week, hope and future falling from me.
Kate Beck spends most of each day sending emails and sleeping and talking to strangers and lovers and finding food and making food and eating food and walking around and driving and taking the bus and sometimes biking from place to place. In between these activities, Kate spends time noticing things and sometimes recording them.