“Humanistic Geography” by Kathleen Rooney, from WHERE ARE THE SNOWS, Texas Review Press

Book cover for Kathleen Rooney's Where Are the Snows. A black road snakes in an s curve through the cover, vertically. To the left is the majority of the cover, bright yellow, with a man wearing Groucho glasses with a fake nose and mustache. He has no face under this. He wears a tie and button down. He is entirely black outlines, white lenses, a peach nose, and otherwise bright yellow, save his 'bright pink pinstripe pants. Above him is a green highway sign reading "HELL." To the right of the road, the background is bright pink and the title in yellow offset from black outlines, "Where Are the Snows." Under this,, but to the left, in pink, the cover reads "Kathleen Rooney" and then "Poems"

Another day, another inspirational coffee mug, poured in the kitchen, drunk in the home office: Don’t Forget To Be Awesome. Okay. Working on it.

March was the month that never ended, then it ended. 

Ambivalence is the norm; that hasn’t changed.

Ray Oldenburg pioneered the term “third place.” If home is the first, and work is the second, the third is an informal community spot. Beauty salons and bars, coffee shops and parks. Pubs and cafes. Main streets. The post office.

I go for a walk with my morning shadow. How many places have I got these days?

Where does place end and space begin? A lodge in the wilderness is not the wilderness. 

Every cozy hearth is hurtling through the cosmos.

Space is abstract; place has meaning. Like, that fence wouldn’t matter to me unless you were leaning on it. 

What, do I have to draw you a map? 

In design school, they teach that for something to be significant it needs to exist in Vitruvian Space, centered in the intersection of desirable, feasible, viable. Which sounds even better when you say it in Latin: venustas, utilitas, firmitas.

I’d like to sit on the porch with you and shell peas, but I haven’t got a porch, or peas, or you. 

Cue the sound of windchimes in the breeze.

I’ll never stand in a driveway and hose down a sports car.

Glamour is, by definition, impractical. Could I begin to live with more extraneous detail? Placemats? Fingerbowls? 

I wish we could stay in a hotel by the sea.

From up here on the third floor, it’s easy to tell when the bells of St. Gertrude’s shatter the glass of silence. 

I wish we could prove to God above that we still loved him.

Church is a third place I never show my face in.

✶✶✶✶

Excerpt from Kathleen Rooney’s Where Are The Snows: Poems, used by permission of Texas Review Press.

✶

Kathleen Rooney looks into the camera. She is in front of a dark bookshelf filled with bright books. Her long dark hair catches the sun and her lipstick matches her bright scarlet dress.

Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a nonprofit publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, as well as a founding member of Poems While You Wait. Her most recent books include the novel Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk (St. Martin’s Press, 2017) and The Listening Room: A Novel of Georgette and Loulou Magritte (Spork Press, 2018). Her World War I novel Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey was published by Penguin in August, and her criticism appears in The New York Times Magazine, The Poetry Foundation website, The Chicago Tribune, The Brooklyn Rail, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago with her spouse, the writer Martin Seay, and teaches at DePaul University.

✶

Whenever possible, we link book titles to Bookshop, an independent bookselling site. As a Bookshop affiliate, Another Chicago Magazine earns a small percentage from qualifying purchases.