Tuscaloosa, Alabama

The breaking news breaks through

the front door & tells us what we already know of

the faces around us. How they spit shit from a jacked up truck, sweat

in the hell they’ve made, splinter

airless air. We scan the faces to see 

if they’re our students, if the features resemble

a white man who made the textbook page for his historical kind of

hate. Always a long walk

home, August boiling like a mouth in Montgomery.

✴

We built a little house, breathed in

the walls & out the windows. Heard the low boil of

bugs, just beyond the edge of

our eden, dim & one season from death. Outside, flat earth

swallows what believes in it. Biblical belly of field, fed.

✴

Across the country, when people hear our name they shudder.

What a shame. We’ve done the same, 

fields away. But they haven’t seen

morning burn pine trees golden & clean. But they haven’t

swam in mud & survived.

Buzz

You call to ask if you should cut your hair
short enough to regret it. Again, our two faces

take another look. A nick of blood clipped into the ear, tenderness close
enough to overlook. Little needles ghosting

skin. What had to be scrubbed,
mourned. Once you’ve cut too close, everyone says

give it time. Hair grows back.

✴

You say you’ve been finding my hair
in the corners of your room. I imagine it threading

the weave of sweaters, catching the air & trailing
behind you. I imagine you wondering where

you’ll find me next. The sheets. The bathtub drain. I think
in your head, which is really mine. I run your fingers

through my hair. Months lengthen.

✴

Neither of us know how to live
with the hum. Without it. I raise you the clipper

& hesitate. Will they won’t they. In the bathroom mirror
your reflection passes through me, like a fear

I haven’t named; a hymn that married me
in pinky promises. What appears still is whole

of buzzing parts, if you look
close enough. The face I know

turns to face me.

Roadkill

Driving the interstate, I pass two dogs.
Their teeth quieted by my engine.
& the dogs hunch, together, over something.
As I pass, they don’t look up, but continue tearing at the carcass.
Limb from limb into mouthfuls of blood.
My eyes flick between the windshield & the dogs.
Where the memory of insects smears the glass.
Like the flies that keep dying in my coke cans, I want to believe in accidents.
Wings beating behind my teeth.
An unrecognizable lump on the tongue.
Tiny lavender blooms of wisteria watch from above as I heave.
Wisteria wraps around my backyard oaks, slowly killing them.
Behind the dogs, kudzu grows along the interstate, strangling the sun from native plants.
It was preached the South would live again because of kudzu.
So we planted it, everywhere.
Vine that ate the South.
A cloak of verdant flat-leaves, draped beautifully in the sun.
I want to believe the horror of the world is an accident.
But the dogs wore collars.
They were someone’s someones.
I was once someone’s someone.
Across my backyard, the wisteria slouched into a year-long sleep.
& where the fence broke, I ran to the street & watched the cars zip by, flies chasing air.
I toed the white line, decibels deadening me.
I wandered until I found something beautiful & ate from it.
It tasted sickly sweet, my freedom. I eat what isn’t mine.
Too busy to stop & walk me home, many watched me as they passed.
From the world I take what I am freely given.
So I grew disgusted at what my mouth could do.
Disgust, too, is a kind of recognition.
I would not know, for some time, what I was feeding on.

---

Kate DeLay is a poet from Tennessee. A 2025 Pushcart Prize winner, her work can be found or forthcoming in the 2025 Best New Poets anthology, The Iowa Review, Pleiades, swamp pink, Adroit Journal, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. Kate is the winner of the 2023 William Matthews Poetry Prize, selected by Diane Seuss. A former Editor of Black Warrior Review, Kate is a recent graduate of University of Alabama’s MFA in Creative Writing and is a PhD student in poetry at Florida State University. Find her at katedelaypoet.com.