The woman I don’t like came with a bouquet of daffodils from her garden, and my heart softened. The young girl came with a bouquet of mums from the grocery store, which matched the only vase I saved. When the girl read her poem, tears ran down her face. So young and just beginning to understand how much pain she can feel. The daffodil woman reached out and touched the mum girl’s arm. I was glad she did. I was across the table and couldn’t. The old man made a cheesecake that weighed six pounds then left for Passover. Wine. Poems. When class was over, I hugged the mum girl who told me how cozy she found our house. I was glad to give her that space to fall into. The daffodil woman: I could probably like her if she wasn’t so much like me.

three months together 
around a table, writing 
into each other 

Elizabeth Kerlikowske

teaches Ekphrastic Writing at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts and volunteers at an alternative high school. She is one of the founding members of Kalamazoo Writers Disorganization, which presents monthly programs for writers as well as a meeting place. Her most recent chapbook is Falling Women (Etchings Press, 2022), with poems by Kerlikowske and visual art by Mary Hatch. The two are also co-authors of Art Speaks: Paintings and Poetry (Kazoo Books, 2018).

Kerlikowske’s first full-length book of poetry, Dominant Hand, is available from Mayapple Press. She is also the author of The Vaudeville Horse (Etchings Press, 2022), The Shape of Dad (a memoir in prose poems), Last Hula (winner of the 2013 Standing Rock Chapbook Competition), and Chain of Lakes.

She has been publishing her poetry and fiction for more than 40 years in such journals and magazines as Encore, Cincinnati Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Passager, and Poemeleon, among others. Her poems have also appeared in New Verse News and Autumn Sky Poetry Daily.

Her work is anthologized in Nothing to Declare: A Guide to the Flash Sequence (White Pine Press, 2016); The Female Complaint: Tales of Unruly Women (Shade Mountain Press, 2015); two of the annual KYSO Flash anthologies, Accidents of Light (2018) and Earth Hymn (2019); and in the Michigan writers anthology published by Western Michigan University (WMU).

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ If my grandfather walked toward me with two arms, I wouldn’t recognize him, micro-CNF by Kerlikowske in Issue 11 of MacQ (January 2022); nominated for Best of the Net 2023

⚡ Into the Oak, prose poem in MacQ-9 (August 2021)

⚡ Tribute to Mary Hatch, prose poem in MacQ-9 (August 2021)

⚡ Three in Prose by Kerlikowske in DIAGRAM (Issue 5.1): “Forty Winks”; “The Girls’ Room”; and “Midway”