Kat Mustatea

Two poems from Kat Mustatea’s A Sort of Perfect Square
followed by a note on the author

A Sort of Perfect Square

The moon is bliss, the handkerchief is truth;
A wailing rain lays waste to what you knew
Of country roads traversing this wild place;
Let’s say two neighing horses—If and When
Are waiting in the rain for who knows whom;
The landscape is a quarter past immense
And time is a terrain of nowhere grace,
With not a single mark to help you choose the way;
You’ve never found where you belong and let’s just say
You never might; the horses drowned or ran away
Or both declined in age and competence and fight;
Given a hand that moves across the page,
Given a sort of perfect square to start,
Given the midnight of your heart, what would you write?

The Wino Room

Intent on curing yet another breach
Between the universe and consciousness,
You’ll linger after in the barren street,
You’ll breathe—electric sheen of moon just out of reach—
The city like a wino room in which the thing
Of greatest beauty breaks in buoyant perpetuity.
Love is too soon an animal when it arrives;
Love is the outer district after words are dead,
Slatted along the rails of yellow passing trains;
Love stands there baffled and bereft, unkempt,
A bum who seeks out what a person has to learn
He has to be in order to be loved—and yet—
No trumpet sounds when you at last are with the one
The gods allowed you to love best. No, not a one.

Kat Mustatea is a poet and playwright based in New York City. As a poet, she is the author of the ongoing digital poetry project Sonnet City (www.sonnetcity.com). As a playwright, she has written four full-length works, Eight Figures (2015), Satellite (2013), The Model (2011), and Glass House (2006), and a suite of short plays that explore otherness and transformation, absurdity, misunderstanding, and what it means to be American. Her plays have been produced in New York, Berlin and Oslo, and she was commissioned by the Abingdon Theatre for her play Leda (2013). She studied philosophy at Columbia University and sculpture at Pratt Institute in New York, and is a member of Dramatists Guild of America and League of Professional Theatre Women. Website: www.mustatea.com