Catherine Moore

KOELBJERB WOMAN

This land, dreary stiff of muck, would never hold me. There is no grasp in exfoliated ocean silt. No real footing for our bark huts along lake Tissø. We wandered in hungers for flint, bone, and horn. Speared for our fish. In my mind’s eye, I lived near the birch-pine and lapwings of my youth. Iridescent greens. Purples in slow wing beat. Where the water knew its place. I stayed as he wanted to stay. In tidal flats where the elk and auroch were easily seen. On black river tracts where our bodies never stayed still.

Catherine Moore is the author of Story (Finishing Line Press), 921b Elysian Fields Avenue (Return to Sender) (Kentucky Story Press, 2015), and Wetlands (dancing girl press, 2016). Her fiction has appeared in Tahoma Literary Review, Six Little Things, Illinois Wesleyan University Press, Stymie Magazine, Indianola Review, and in various anthologies. Her work was included in The Best Small Fictions of 2015. Catherine lives in the Nashville area where she enjoys a thriving writer's community and was awarded a MetroArts grant. Catherine earned a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Tampa and she currently teaches English at a community college. Previously, she served as an editor at the Tampa Review Online and at Toe Good Poetry.