Sally asks what I mean when I describe the poet as “out there”

and I tell her it has something to do with self-exposure.

Not the trench coat man leaping from the bushes, nor the guy

slowing his truck to ask for directions while fondling his lap,

nor the girlfriend demonstrating how a speculum works:

why don’t you try? But more of a stripper, a peep show worker,

who must have plugged her ears when mother told her

to keep her knees together, who reveals instead of runs

from the details because by telling she is relieved,

wised up: reader as therapist, reader as confessor.

Poking, provoking with her sharp stick, she knocks you

flat with her sin history, expects you to decipher, taste,

translate, as she splays what floated up from her deepest,

most solitary depths, so far from silence, braying, wailing.

She’s really “out there.” Fleshy, masked in black,

but so over being body-shamed, I cheer for her.

Never holding back due to modesty or fear of what

others will think, compelled and confident, hot she is

to show and tell. To break rules. Rip off masks. If she claims

her untitled fourteen-line poem crafted with no particular

rhythm or rhyme scheme and no turn is a sonnet, well,

it is. She remakes us into critics, renders a choice

between deafness or awareness, makes us ask: Will this

non-steroid inflammatory work for me? Is this the ice

that will shrink my swelling? Always, finding one more

good line, vacillating between hinged and unhinged,

balancing on the blade between whispering and howling,

wrestling with the courage of her restrictions.

Katherine Edgren has two books of poetry: Keeping Out the Noise, by Kelsay Books and The Grain Beneath the Gloss, by Finishing Line Press, plus two chapbooks: Long Division and Transports. Her work has appeared in journals including: Coe Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Light, Hanging Loose Press, Orchards Poetry Journal, and Third Wednesday, among others.