Kraft

By L. S. KLATT 

Permit me to apply these squares of American cheese to my spacesuit. Is it that I am a man? Or crazed? How will such a man make it in space, the consuming fire of reentry, & the joy of it? I am a fat man. American. Vienna sausages have always been sweet music to my fingers, yet the Germanics have done so much damage. Except the rocketeers who engineered the success of the American space program. And it was the Germans who are half- responsible for Ohio where Neil Armstrong was born. Could I advertise myself as a Kraft man, posting an American flag on the moon? Good question. Yes. But abetter one might be: what kind of heat shield would American cheese provide? It’s hard to believe that Ohio was once considered the Northwest Territory, that every small step west was a tap of the spacebar pitching us deeper into the shit. Frontiersmen wore leathers; what that did to their skin was barbaric. Yet Americans have come to occupy new worlds. BackspacefShiftiBackspacefShifti

New poems from L. S. Klatt have appeared or will appear in Birmingham Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, Carolina Quarterly, Crazyhorse, and Denver Quarterly. His collection of prose poems, The Wilderness After Which, is due out from Otis Books (Seismicity Editions) in 2017. 

[Purchase your copy of Issue 06 here]

Kraft

Related Posts

cover of HEIRLOOM

March 2025 Poetry Feature: Catherine-Esther Cowie’s Heirloom

CATHERINE-ESTHER COWIE
Her eye-less eye. My long / longings brighten, like tinsel, the three-fingered / hand. Ashen lip. To exist in fragments. / To exist at all. A comfort. / A gutting. String her up then, / figurine on the cot mobile. / And I am the restless infant transfixed.

Dispatches from Mullai Nilam, Marutha Nilam, and Neithal Nilam

VIJAYALAKSHMI
There is fire everywhere, / both inside and outside. / Unaware of the intensity of the fire, / they maintain silence / like the serenity of a corpse. / From the burning fire / bursts out a waterfall tainted in red. / All over the shores have bloomed / the flaming lilies of motherhood.

Gray Davidson Carroll's headshot next to the cover of The Common Issue 28.

Podcast: Gray Davidson Carroll on “Silent Spring”

GRAY DAVIDSON CARROLL
Poet Gray Davidson Carroll speaks to managing editor Emily Everett about their poem “Silent Spring,” which appears in The Common’s fall issue. Gray talks about poetry as a way to witness and observe the world and how we experience it, and how it’s changing.