Karen Eileen Sisk’s poems have appeared or will appear in Permafrost, Harpur’s Palate, Barely South, Ellipsis, and Oxford Magazine. She received her MA in literature from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, and is currently working on her PhD in English with a focus in Creative Writing at Oklahoma State University.
Karen Sisk
Karen Sisk: For My Mother
Albatross mothers fly over water for hard glints, food signals to feed chicks flopping fuzzy, thin-skinned on lava-black beaches. They grab bottle caps, lighter fragments, fork and comb tines to regurgitate into gaping beaks, fill their chick’s loose coin purse bellies that starve and burst. Eyes shrivel to peppercorns. Bodies, bone and feather shadows, cracked […]