Published Work
Drowning,
Family Dinner: A Metaphysical Check-In,
Escape and Loss
&
Eyes of the Dead
- Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Issue 21:3, Summer 2020
A Twenty-Four-Year-Old Getting Two Dozen Roses at Forty-Nine: A Dialogue with Myself
&
Life Care Planning
- Fledgling Rag, Issue 20, Spring 2020
"All the proceeds from the sale of Fledgling Rag go directly to the Lancaster Cleft Palate Clinic."
Directions for purchase can be found on the website: https://www.irisgpress.org/fledgling-rag
Second Chances,
A Few of My Favorite Lost Things
&
Unbearable Lightness
- Anti-Heroin Chic, April 2020
http://heroinchic.weebly.com/blog/poetry-by-kristin-kowalski-ferragut
-
Second Chances posted on Indran Amirthanayagam's YouTube Poetry Channel
The Enormity of It
- Mojave He[Art] Review, Issue 17, September 2019
https://mojaveheart.com/2355-2/?fbclid=IwAR0NS45NHKBI0jxbI3KdaBdCNLolRpVtOgd0T2gWgLG5h8vYfcw3TniAutQ
Vacuum
&
Transgendered Ex at Son's Birthday Party
- Bourgeon, June 2019
http://bourgeononline.com/2019/06/two-poems-by-kristin-kowalski-ferragut/
Oracle of the First Kiss
- Published in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Issue 19:4, Fall 2018
http://www.beltwaypoetry.com/oracle-of-the-first-kiss/
Leaves of Late November
- Published in Nightingale and Sparrow, Issue 1, February 2019
http://online.fliphtml5.com/tpuo/bfub/#p=40
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1796690406?ref_=pe_3052080_397514860
The Clotheshorse
&
Rats
- Published in The Novice Writer, Issue 1, Spring 2019
Cowboys
- Published in Mercurial Stories, Vol. 1, Issue 34: Dawn, Fall 2018
https://mercurialstories.com/2018/11/17/volume-1-issue-34-dawn/16/https://mercurialstories.com/2018/11/17/volume-1-issue-34-dawn/16/
The Magnolia Review, Volume 6, Issue 1, April 2020 - 6 poems
Video from Third Thursday Poetry Series by the City of Takoma Park.
I run 29:40 - 42:55 in the midst of good company.
When Screens Replace Touch
Invisibility I say when my son asks
what superhero power I would choose.
I wasn’t much older than he is when I set
my goal to be a disembodied spirit.
Think I’ll have that one day because I’m lucky.
I’d forego touch if I could go unseen, but I’d rather
have it all — the feel of wind and fingertips,
skin and hair and be out of sight.
Fond of woods, yurts, and tents for their
simple beauty it’s true, but also their lack
of mirrors. I don’t perceive a movie of me when
we talk, which is why it scares me when you ask
Why do you look like that? Why did you make
that face? How do I know? I can’t see me.
A man once responded only
to my words, he held still to my
hand through grimace, shrug, even tear never
asking. I tag him the one that got away.
Can’t faces be just about the rest — breath,
blinks, kisses, sustenance, and not freckles and
wrinkles, pretty eyes and cute noses, crooked
teeth and dark circles.
Yet here we are. You watching me, and me watching
me and I don’t know where else to look.
Published in the anthology POEMS FROM THE LOCKDOWN, Willowdown Books, 2020
Kiss Planted
For My Dad, Ron E.
1940-2012
Tastes of salt, grey, tang of tobacco, sweet sweat like
ground mace, garlic and lemon paste have clung
to my lips for seven years. The last kiss planted
on your forehead, watered aplenty in your passing,
bloomed past grief, casting a shade of melancholy.
Makes it easy to window-stare for hours, meditate on
stones, gravity, creases, and spicy scents that endure.
I stop and double take whenever passing the smoke
of cigars or cherry pipe tobacco, increasingly rare.
I remember you, tall and linear in black and white in
the pipe days, before you lost teeth to hold the bit.
Less often in the cigar days, shorter,
built of 45 degree angles.
I don’t begrudge that you forgot me. Who
was the most me to you? Parenting hosts
a fair amount of missing, the adorable
toddler, lost in a larger form.
Backing out of the room, I thanked you until my throat
was dry; you bedridden, slight beneath
the sheet. The same man I met at the door
when I was little with a kiss on the lips.