Welcome readers!
We’re happy to introduce Heidi Kasa, our selection for July’s Poetry at Ephemera. Thanks to Heidi (who is also a paid subscriber!) and everyone who submitted! If you’d like to participate, we will be fielding submissions each month to publish one poem per issue from the same poet for the month. Each poet receives a $200 honorarium. For full rules and more info please see our designated post about Poetry at Ephemera. You can also submit via the button:
Introducing, Heidi Kasa!
Writer Bio
Heidi Kasa writes fiction and poetry. Her work has been a finalist for a Black Lawrence Press award and shortlisted for a Fractured Lit award. Kasa's writing has appeared in The Racket, Meat for Tea, The Raw Art Review, Ab Terra, and Ruminate: The Waking, among others. Her fiction chapbook Split was published by Monday Night Press in 2022. Kasa works as an editor and lives in Austin. See more of her work at www.heidikasa.com.
Artist Statement
I’m concerned with contrasts and what’s yielded from spaces created between contrasts. Life and death, imagination and reality, gentleness and ferocity. What seems so alive, so vibrant, we sometimes miss: a butterfly passing a bathroom window. Under dim lights and in the dirty hallway of a museum, forgotten and dusty, the same type of butterfly on display can look even more alive in death. My series of bullet poems continues to explore the contrast between what holds life and what takes it away. After reading K-Ming Chang’s stunning book Bestiary, the line “a bullet doesn’t ask to be given back” sparked in me the question: what if a bullet asked, and we listened? What would it ask for? We have made assumptions about bullets that—once thrown into question—make me wonder and dream a slightly different reality. Often, my fiction and my poems veer into different realities that overlap with or at least highlight our own. Spaces between realities allow us to imagine and then enact new ways of being.
Poems
Each issue of Ephemera spanning July will feature one poem from Heidi Kasa. After each issue drops, the poem from that issue will then appear here as well. This post will remain on our Substack, free to view, for the year.
Poem 1 of 4
With DustA Ulysses butterfly passes
the bathroom window.Under a tumult of water
no eyes catch black-tipped wings.Blue flash again by the sill.
To preserve, press glass down.Long hall.
Sundry of still antennae.Dim except for
tiny lit up namesas in Ulysses and a fast blue,
startling eyes out of their silence.After, water touches skin
and a great blue wing
flaps through pouring.
Poem 2 of 4
The Bullet Cures
“a bullet doesn’t ask to be given back”
-K-Ming Chang, BestiaryThe bullet asks to be the fire that melts it.
The bullet asks to be given back, returned to the earth. To become a bridge, a garden gate, a plant liner. A tent, enclosing instead of burying. A ring that keeps going and going, running from itself and into itself like wisdom, like love.
The bullet asks to be the cure. To turn into the helmet saving a head from crushing. To create the structured bones of a manmade waterfall. The bullet wants to be a shield. To be shingles on a roof. Provide cover. The bullet aches to serve a higher purpose. To be a wheelbarrow distributing seeds. To be the pin in your glasses, the tiny one that holds the whole thing together. To be as cold as an ice cream scoop, as warm as a pacemaker. To become what ticks in your watch.
The bullet asks to crumble in pieces. To be delicate like lace or a spiderweb. To transform into the jar or the candle it holds. To flicker and fade slowly, liquify as it’s consumed. To live as an outdoor chair, abandoned. To die as one. Its rust the dirt reclaiming its victim.
The bullet wants to be the echo, not be echoed. The bullet wants to forget itself, to forget it was ever there.
The bullet asks to rest, to rest. To rest.
Poem 3 of 4
The Bullet Never Quite Stops
“a bullet doesn’t ask to be given back”
-K-Ming Chang, BestiaryThe bullet asks to be the key.
The bullet asks to be round or spiral or a shape that travels up and down instead of one way. To be revered for what it can hold instead of what it takes away. The bullet asks to save itself. To run a marathon, for real: to keep running and running and never quite stop. To exist in the eyes and the ears instead of as a cold shadow to them.
The bullet longs to dissolve the distance between people and bring them closer, not further. Wants to smash walls and rip open locked things, to destroy what keeps us separate from each other. The bullet asks to turn rivers into ribbons. Wants to be the softness instead of what pierces it.
The bullet asks to turn around.
Poem 4 of 4
The Bullet Gives Away
“a bullet doesn’t ask to be given back”
-K-Ming Chang, BestiaryThe bullet asks to be a continued dream, a mere figment of your imagination. To be a gift.
The bullet asks to be a prosthetic hand or an umbrella. To prop up the hospital bed, asking nothing of others. The bullet wants to be a buckle or a bucket, to hold itself up and to fill itself. To mutate into a music stand or perhaps a whistle. To draw worlds of shapes as a half-used pencil.
The bullet asks…
FULL POEM IN EPHEMERA’S NEXT ISSUE