Poetry comic & poem by Catherine Kyle

Catacombs 1  
 
Dieu n’est pas                    
l’auteur de la mort 
 
(God is not
the author of death) 
 
— Inscription in the Catacombs of Paris 
 
 
 
flesh rends from billowing bone;           
sea breaks on the lip of the sleeping 
giantess named anatomy
 
we are here but here is a word
            filled with eyelets that swallow
and exhale gales—gaping,
 
yawning, insatiable mouths                                
that gobble the starlight,  
stones under their tongues 
 
everything sits on the jaw of the world               
like kids staring down from the top
of a slide into an opaque esophagus
 
everything shivers like fur wet with rain
             but naturally
God is not the author of death

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Catherine Kyle is the author of the poetry collection Parallel, the poetry chapbooks Flotsam and Gamer: A Role-Playing Poem, and the hybrid-genre collection Feral Domesticity. She teaches literature at the College of Western Idaho and creative writing at The Cabin, a literary nonprofit. Her website is www.catherinebaileykyle.com.