Kathrine Keller

The Marriage of Equals

I will bring you a piece of myself that I have disguised,

she said. Hold my hands. Listen, she said. We name things

by their sound and when we do, we find their essence. An abacus

is a small creature that crawls the way a crab scuttles. A blind man

will fall in love with a bald woman by running his fingers

over the bumps and grooves on her skull, feeling out her psyche.

Sandra, you are just like me, he told her. We are the same.

I will toss a wedding ring over the spout of a teapot

and we will be trinket twins forever.

In the valley, they saw four times a full moon, and in its rising

was the dapper smile of nobody. The moon is only the moon—

no other name would fit to it. And so there was a mazurka!

Fifteen ghosts of Christmas past dances and played the tambourine,

while the sidelines waited, thick with expectation, for the cake.

I understand your eyes when I look past them, she said. He passed her

the thin yellow body of a poppy. And look—you’ve given me

a pledge of troth. I will take your edible steps and mark them up,

bake them into cornbread and serve them at dusk. He took her hand

and examined it with his. He said, you are just like me.

Bio

Kitt Keller received her MFA in poetry at Arizona State University in May of 2014. She lives in Tempe, AZ.