Genevieve Kohlhardt
Artist/Poet

While waiting tables makes for a fine day job, the things I fit into the cracks between shifts are the things that make me a poet and an artist as opposed to a waitress. Most of my work is concerned with gender identity, but I often explore the relationships between the literary and the visual and have recently been writing a great deal about my experiences traveling. I graduated in 2007 with degrees in Studio Art and Creative Writing from CU Boulder and will be heading to Boise State in the fall to start a MFA in poetry.

I Conceive a Scalpel

You might wonder
if I am a minefield,
Or a spiral staircase
of curls. Or a language
you heard once, but never
uttered.
But I manage to
keep a catalogue of your body
parts, spinal and strand, bundle
of muscle, popping
of knee. Your muscles and the
way they remember things I know
you forget.
(How strange,
that your lip
is just a thing. A noun.
A slab of skin
concealing the jutting
of your jaw bone.)