Katherine Edgren grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  She was first published at the age of seventeen under her maiden name:  Kathy Kool.  She began to write more seriously in 2004, was awarded first place in the Writer’s Digest non-rhyming poetry contest, and appeared in The Year’s Best Writing in 2005. She has been published in the Christian Science Monitor as well as various journals including the Birmingham Poetry Review, Barbaric Yawp, Main Channel Voices, Oracle, Bear Creek Haiku, the Coe Review, and the Evening Street Review.

Katherine served as a City Council member in Ann Arbor, Michigan, raised money for the ACLU, and worked as a project manager on research and intervention projects in Detroit addressing asthma and air quality. She has worked with adults with serious mental illnesses, with ex-offenders, and with college students.

Her chapbook, “Transports,” published by Finishing Line Press, charts impressions and observations arising in modes of transport, including bike, kayak, sailboat, fishing boat, car, and her feet.  Her latest book of poetry, “Long Division,” also published by Finishing Line Press, looks at life, aging, and death.

Three poems by Katherine Edgren

The Swan

Milky veined quartz
glides on winter’sback.

Tucked wings—
frozen carnations,
iceberg fragments,
jagged glass.

Beware
the swan that lures you,
that blurs your eyes with beauty,
then bites you.

Country Club

Ambrose arose in his knife-creased pants, clean white jacket,
a linen napkin draped on his arm, and led patrons
to flower-decked tables or the bar.
An elderly black man, ninety—they said.
Quiet, with the sweetest smile, the loveliest name.
Ambrose, immortal.

He was a friend to everyone:
from the Bookkeeper I assisted every day after school,
to the industrious ladies who diced and pounded and cooked the food,
and scrubbed pots and pans in the kitchen with their strong hands.

This community of larks sang as they flour-dusted the chickens
or mashed the potatoes—about their daughters,
their bus rides to work, their men. I chatted with them during breaks,
or on the way to the powder room. One had been a masseuse,
and a few times used her kneading skills on my back.
Ebullient Lucille, the Head Cook, used to shriek sometimes
and crow, “Ooh, I love to hear myself scream!”

Their muffled words and abandoned laughter
would drift under the door that separated their kitchen
from my dark cave of an office lit by one florescent bulb,
where I totaled up bar and food bills collected by Ambrose,
until the numbers matched—
watching signatures deteriorate with every drink.
I stapled the adding machine tapes onto the stacks of bills
where they dragged like sorry tails

and handed over these productions to my boss—the Bookkeeper.
Her white legs were encased in sheer white nylons.
She sported a tight round ball of hair high on the back of her head,
wore tailored suits and dresses—
and carried tight little buns at the base of her spine.

One day she told me if I liked my job,
I shouldn’t fraternize with “the help,”
as though we weren’t.

The Map Lover

He was crazy about maps.
He disappeared into them. (He could get really small.)
He drove his fingertip like a car, imagined places
he’d never been, or places to revisit.
He found towns he’d never heard of.
He could measure distances between thumb and finger,
choose alternate routes. He liked the sureness—
north forever up, east right, south down, west left:
a deck he could stand on.
He liked the way a map crackled when opened,
and the way it folded from large and unwieldy
to flat and pocket-sized.
A map was a familiar friend he could carry with him.
He was never lonely with a map.
He liked knowing the earth’s curvature is flattened,
and forgave any accompanying inaccuracies.
His map was like a hope chest, or a bottle with a genie inside.