Catherine Pabalate

Catherine Pabalate (she/her) is a university student studying English and biology, with a specific focus on the study of health, rhetoric, and literature. Her creative work has been published in White Wall Review, Cellar Door Magazine, and the Raven Review, among others. She loves Gothic literature with a focus on embodiment, suffering, and the human condition. She currently works as a bookseller for an independent bookstore in North Carolina.

Easy read of the poems in the images above:

terminable kafka

there is a horrid creature

underneath my girlish flesh

though, bound by exoskeleton

she is reduced to the viscera

beneath, guts unexplored

crying tears over my unshed skin

i cut my spine by its segments

hoping that the carnage along

the mirror reflection

is more meaningful than the glare

then, i mimic a jagged proboscis

with a touch unable to pierce

feeding on paper decay

because my only true talent

is the piecemeal production of nature

i am the termite to wood

asymptotic to the grotesque

envious of the roach who rules

as keeper of lamentation:

kingdom of the wretched skies

sugar scrapes along my palms

but the aftertaste of appreciation

is like sour plums, a heavy

unreachable flavor that sits

far back in the esophagus

so is it unhonorable, truly

to loathe their lace-bound flight?

the larvae becomes more but

i am, instead, a victim of

an unsisyphean cycle

the wheel breaks along its axle

and i fall, wingless, into empty air