Your thinking is, does it matter what you’ve seen? It’s about what you’ve stomached, feet having grown fungus in a country of putrid waters, leeches on shin and thigh, the way you peeled them, swatches of your skin on their suckers—and that was just the walk back. Somewhere on a misplaced road, you’d managed to lose your sidearm, perhaps when you stumbled on the legless remains of police action gone bad, everything gone bad, from the chapped lips of command, to broadcast, to microphone feedback, to wild-eyed boys and final execution— would anyone even believe it? That is your answer to what you should tell your father left waiting back at camp, eating from a can of survivalist rations, expectations having pitched a tent in the dark, under a grimacing moon: Mayday, Mayday. This is not a test.
Katherine Mercurio Gotthardt, M.Ed., (she/her) is a disabled Gen X poet of Lebanese and Sicilian descent. A first-generation college graduate, she is the author of 14 books, including a Silver Award winner from the Nonfiction Authors Association, an Amazon bestseller, a BookFest First Place award winner, and a Library of Virginia 2024 Literary Awards nominated collection. Since the early 1990s, her work has appeared in Yankee, Frogpond, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Miracle Monocle’s anthology You Blew It, Southern Quill, BigCityLit, Haiku Canada, Panoply, North of Oxford, ONE ART and dozens of others. Three of her poems are forthcoming in Saving Ourselves, an anthology focusing women’s and girls’ rights, edited by Tammy Nuzzo-Morgan, Ph.D., Poet Laureate Ermerita of Suffolk County, NY, alongside other Poets Laureate. Since the mid 2000s, Gotthardt has won awards from Poetry Society of Virginia, Virginia Writers Club, Loudoun County Library Foundation, Prince William County Arts Council and various publications. Her poem “Now Entering Manassas” was included in a time capsule as part of the City of Manassas, Virginia’s 150th anniversary celebration.
