Katie Daniels

Katie grew up in East Anglia, moving to Leicestershire in 1990. She is a freelance arts development consultant, poet and fiction writer.

Her first full-length collection of poetry, Catch, was published by Redbeck Press in Summer 2007. Her work has also been published in various national poetry magazines and she was a finalist in the Leicester & Leicestershire Short Story Competition in 2005 and 2006.

Poems by Katie

A decade later

she walks down the alley
where the air vent from a café kitchen
breathes the smell of burnt bacon fat

past the bar
where she once put her bare foot
on a man’s crotch under the table

into the park
where oversized leaves blow
through the open gates, slide under her feet

in this university town
that swells in autumn
she is thinking: today it is ten years

since my husband first kissed me
and here I am unable to concentrate
on anything but you

as she drifts through vents and gates,
over the park, above the museum,
the air becoming hard under her toes

Katie Daniels

Name calling
(With thanks to Kerry Featherstone)

The vicar calls me Katherine.

I stare at him.

He explains that it’s important
to adhere to the baptismal name.

I tell him I was christened Katie.

Twenty years later
I get to thinking about this:

does God only know me by one name?

Personally I suspect
that God knows me by many names

among them slag, slob and bitch
which I wasn’t christened either.

There she goes, God’s thinking,
failed housewife, cleavage
flasher, part time shoddy writer
of vaguely desperate
poems, dysfunctional
daughter, insubordinate
ex civil servant, the strumpet.

And I’m saying
hey God, cruel beast,
purveyor of injustice,
navy jumper wearer
(I know about the navy jumper
because I dreamt it),
sly fox, trafficker in irony.

God and me get along just fine.

But he’s never called me Katherine.

Katie Daniels

I speak too coarsely and warmly for silky rabbits. And my words sound
even stranger to all inky fish and scribbling foxes. - Friedrich Nietzsche

Validated :: Woody @ e-Kit.co.uk , 24 Feb 2007

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