The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Kathleen Kirk's "Interior Sculpture"

After Rodin

I was a lump of clay,
unfinished, underworked.

After Rodin, no one breathed
life into me. I tore myself

from the earth by the handfuls,
carried myself home in old cloth.

White powder on my face.
After him, I couldn’t work

my knuckles into the gray clay
that was me.

I could not shape myself
from the formless cold

into the waltzing fire.

This selection comes from Kathleen Kirk’s book Interior Sculpture, available from Dancing Girl Press. Purchase your copy here!

Kathleen Kirk is the author of five poetry chapbooks, most recently Interior Sculpture: poems in the voice of Camille Claudel (Dancing Girl Press, 2014) and Nocturnes (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2012), with a sixth, The ABCs of Women’s Work, forthcoming from Red Bird in 2015. Her work appears in many journals, including Arsenic Lobster, Poetry East, Redheaded Stepchild, Stirring, and Wicked Alice. She is the poetry editor for Escape Into Life. The poems featured here were commissioned by Columbus Dance Theatre for the world premier of Claudel, a dance, theatre, and music collaboration. Kathleen blogs at her accidental blog, Wait! I Have a Blog?! http://kathleenkirkpoetry.blogspot.com/

Donna Vorreyer is the author of A House of Many Windows (Sundress Publications, 2013) as well as six chapbooks, most recently Encantado, a collaboration with artist Matt Kish from Redbird Chapbooks forthcoming in April. She is an assistant poetry editor for Extract(s), and her second collection is forthcoming from Sundress Publications in 2016.