Souvenir

A Journal

Morgantown West Virginia, 26505 United States

"I'm going to come back to West Virginia when this is over. There's something ancient and deeply-rooted in my soul. I like to think that I have left my ghost up one of those hollows, and I'll never really be able to leave for good until I find it. And I don't want to look for it, because I might find it and have to leave".----Breece D'J Pancake, in a letter to his mother. 

Katherine Monica


Animal Girls

 

Strange window through which your fears are reflected//mirror in shorthand
you and me pulling & pulling     each other in & out of bullfighting rings
do you like how it feels    no     give it time    I am deciding to build you a giant house I
am deciding   to build you a giant lake   you don’t even have to want it anymore    you
don’t have to want it    it will be given to you regardless      we are the girls like birdcages
exhausted of the singing thing inside us always pecking & snapping at our outsides    you
are the boys like mosquitos in winter     half-relieved to give up after so often being
swatted         but I don’t    I turn my head I don’t want to want  it   I touch her back & it is
soft I want to sink into it she swats me     I pull myself in & out of bird cages I touch your
singing thing to my singing thing   it doesn’t hurt like it’s supposed to    do you like how
it feels    yes yes   that can’t be right    you drown yourself in the lake I built you    first
treading water for an uncomfortable amount of time             I almost thought to claw back

 

Little blue glass dolphin from a tiny store in a small town in Rhode Island. The owners are really nice and act like we're the only people who've come in all day every time we go there. We probably are, but I bet they'd act that way even if they were a really busy successful store because they just seem like those kind of people. 

Kate Monica is a 21 year old college student in Connecticut. Her work has been featured in periodicals including Electric Cereal, TheNewerYork, The Quietus, Words Dance, Hart House Review, Drunk in a Midnight Choir, and others. Her first book, Nervous Universe, was published by Electric Cereal this summer.