katherine with the lazy eye. short. and not a good poet.
what it means
A woman finds out that a high school classmate has been found dead in an abandoned building, her body twisted. There’s an implication that she has been raped. The speaker didn’t even like Katherine and certainly kept her distance from the slow ugly girl, but she finds herself grieving.
The speaker realizes she might not be so different from Katherine.
Everyone deserves care and respect.
why I like the poem
One aspect of poetry is taking an unvarnished look at yourself. For that, this poem wins gold stars. I cannot look away from how the speaker holds herself accountable for how she thinks of Katherine as other—bad poet, bad morals, loser in jobs and love. I want this level of courage.
She also takes a theme I hold dear—that everyone is of value—and does it without annoying moralizing.
craft
It’s both extremely concrete in its scene setting—the McDonald’s uniform, the styrofoam cups—and very subtle in how it parses out other information. How do we know that the speaker and Katherine are Black? Because of the picnic tables full of white people. What we see over there, tells more about what’s center stage. The attack on Katherine happens off stage but this line “your body was supposed to be as twisted as / it was gonna get” lets me know it was brutal.
Think if she had just called this poem “Katherine.” Boring. In the biz, we call that a placeholder title, the one you put down as you are writing. This title is so funny—a lazy eye is funny in an uncomfortable, are we really going to mock other people’s flaws kind of way; the uncapitalized fragments with periods are funny syntactically; and calling someone else a bad poet in your poem is funny in a did she really just throw that much hubris on the page? I laugh uncomfortably every time I read this title. And by making me find it funny, harris makes me culpable. Because I have laughed, I too am on the journey with the speaker; I feel ashamed, and I too realize that Katherine is someone’s beautiful baby.