At not yet two, she needs me
to show her the moon each night
because the word moon has just
been brought to her and like a queen’s
fresh-starched collar, it holds her now,
erect in lace, all posture and itch.
The horse’s spine is not a flagpole.
Its mane is not a flag. But since
we plunge that horse deep
into other countries, its spine’s a flagpole,
its mane a flag. What is the child
in the moonlight? A speaker since,
in all that dark, we placed her
in this beam of words.
Katie Umans’ first full-length collection of poems, Flock Book, was published by Black Lawrence Press in 2012. Her writing has since been published in The Kenyon Review, Los Angeles Review, Sixth Finch, RHINO, and others. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan and, from 2005–2006, was a Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She is a past winner of the Orlando Prize in Short Fiction (A Room of Her Own Foundation), the James Wright Poetry Award (from Mid-American Review), and the Columbia Poetry Prize.
