katharine johnsen

Katharine Johnsen

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BIRTHDAY

by Katharine Johnsen

                     Boca Raton, March 1995

Clasping my hand around my grandfather's, I pulled him from a 
doze
to rehearse; he was my Daddy Warbucks and I was turning seven,
obsessed with Annie. When he wanted to know how we should 
celebrate,

I said, a party with my friends. I hear her voice now, my grandmother
asking, What friends do you have down here? and my answer: Leah and 
Harry, Shirley and Jules, Arleen and Harold. So my grandparents' 
closest friends

came to my birthday party, couldn't eat the cake because of their 
diabetes, cholesterol, blood pressure. In a drawer is a photograph 
my grandmother took that night: Shirley leaning against the door, 
the others sitting, watching

as my grandfather and I dance and sing to a cassette tape
of the cast recording. I am only the floating hem of a navy
polka-dotted skirt as if it twirls out of the frame on its own.

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Katharine JohnsenKatharine Johnsen studies and teaches at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she is the recipient of the Bernice Kert Fellowship. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Mid-American Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Birmingham Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She was recently awarded a scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and earned her BA from Emory University.

Katharine Johnsen

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MY OBITUARIES

by Katharine Johnsen

I started reading the obituaries
after he came home from the hospital,

checked them like he checked his stocks,
like they mattered as much as his test results.

I was preparing to navigate
my own goodbye. I read about the fresh

deaths; I read the archives posted
as part of a This Day in History series.

For three months I surrounded myself
with death—steeped and immersed myself.

I followed each reported surgery
and hospitalization of Ted Kennedy,

grieved for Gerald Schoenfeld,
Sydney Chaplin, Bea Arthur, Horton Foote—

those theater giants he taught me to admire.
Every day I lost a new, meaningful someone,

each a dry run for the one I never wanted
to prepare myself to lose.

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Katharine JohnsenKatharine Johnsen studies and teaches at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she is the recipient of the Bernice Kert Fellowship. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Mid-American Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Birmingham Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She was recently awarded a scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and earned her BA from Emory University.