Kaitlyn Crow

Kaitlyn Crow (she/they) is a queer writer based in Charlottesville, Virginia. Their work has appeared in Door Is A Jar, COUNTERCLOCK, and Screen Door Review among others. You can find them on Instagram @kaitlynwriteswords.

Easy read of the poems in the images above:

White Iris

Knees apart in front of my floor length closet mirror,

big toes hooked around the bottom corners of the door frame,

I wondered if everyone could split apart like that.

Folds, layers, depths to which I dared not bring myself closer,

for fear my clumsy fingertips would disintegrate the damp tissue paper

until there was nothing left to admire.

Once a month, a volunteer brought a cart of supplies

into my fifth-grade classroom. That May, we took oil pastels

and drew on the construction paper O’Keeffe irises.

Some of the boys, the ones with older brothers,

whispered and elbowed each other the entire lesson.

I feared they knew something I never could.

Later, I stood wide-eyed and silent, a meditation,

staring at the familiar form hanging in the museum hall.

Impossibly delicate, but too beautiful not to touch.

Playdate, Early Spring

The pine trees behind my house whispered adventure,

promised make believe, away from the world.

We put up our hair in a half dozen uneven braids

and grinned, gap-toothed in mismatching places.

Shelter built from fallen branches leaned against trunk,

crouching, we created a space just big enough for two.

Dirt wearing into the knees of our jeans, we pressed fingertips

in the mud leftover from weekend storms.

We shaped pies in our hands, adorned them

with wildflower petals, tiny sticks for birthday candles.

Buttercup yellow tickling our chins, breath and body heat

passing between us like giggled secrets:

I held her hand between the roots.

In Defense of Our Break-up Tattoos

So hollow, so placed, just there, impulse decision

at what I thought must be rock bottom made permanent,

a forty-five-dollar outline of a dollar store Valentine’s

heart injected just beneath my collarbone. Thick-lined

beauty, its texture rises when the air pressure shifts.

So plain, so uninspired. I’ve met a dozen other women

with the same tattoo somewhere on their bodies—

we gather in gym locker rooms, in hipster coffee shops,

in the bar bathroom at a show on Saturday night.

They flash me the inside of their wrist, the top of their foot

or a hipbone, even, and we jump and squeal, excited

to find oneself reflected in a stranger, a first heartbreak

that felt so shattering we had to ink it back together

skin-deep.