C. Kubasta
CONTACT:
Email: wfopvpres@gmail.com
Website: www.ckubasta.com
BIO:
C. Kubasta writes poetry, prose & hybrid forms. Her favorite rejection (so far) noted that one editor loved her work, and the other hated it. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks: A Lovely Box, which won the 2014 Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Chapbook Prize, and &s, the full-length poetry collections, All Beautiful & Useless (BlazeVOX) and Of Covenants (Whitepoint Press); her fiction includes the novels Girling (Brain Mill Press), This Business of the Flesh (Apprentice House), and most recently the short story collection Abjectification (Apprentice House). Find her at ckubasta.com. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @CKubastathePoet.
PUBLICATIONS:
Abjectification, Apprentice House, order here.
This Business of the Flesh, Apprentice House, order here.
Girling, Brain Mill Press, order here.
Of Covenants, Whitepoint Press, order here.
A Lovely Box, Finishing Line Press, 2013, order here.
All Beautiful & Useless, BlazeVOX [books], 2015, order here.
&s, Finishing Line Press, 2016, order here.
Poetry
The Myth of the Underage Woman
What I think is a hummingbird,
heart rate more than a thousand beats a minute, resting
respiration in the hundreds—is a sphinx moth: still beautiful,
somewhat rare, nectar feeder, honey stealer. It courts
confusion. This isn’t about birds at all.
What looked sodden & substantial under the surface
is just water contacting water, aping solid.
Even a dream where your sister offers
a bushel of bird beaks means nothing finally.
Female dragonflies of the A. Juncea species
fall from the sky to avoid copulating with males.
Veined cellophane wings glitter the ground; underbellies of
thorax showing. The observant scientists note:
This is an atypical posture for a dragonfly.
The underbelly of the thorax is called the sternum; the females
assume this posture to mimic death. When threatened, the human
response includes an instant increase in heart rate & blood pressure.
Muscles, lungs, brain bathed in blood—the flow swells
hundreds of percent to arm us for whatever is coming.
It must mean something: the way you turn toward it, or
cower & cover, hands splayed over sternum, wings still.
Originally published in Entropy Magazine
250 word bio, preferably third-person
Offering can mean a thing presented or sacrificed “in worship or devotion,” “in tribute or as token of esteem.” My father gave me The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary because he didn’t know about rows of fabric-clad volumes full of citations. That’s what I wanted. All the possibilities of that verbal noun.
That’s what you think when you receive a Facebook message from a former teacher. When a person is chosen, complex feelings may accompany being chosen.
What it means to be a very smart girl, a girl who can go far—beyond where you are: which is why he takes such interest. Why he worries, years later, because he didn’t _____ you, that you might think yourself “unattractive” or “unworthy” or unlovable.
You’re told you’ve always been precocious. That at your first doctor’s appointment, you flirted with the doctor when he changed your diaper.
Each story presents a mirror of itself:
You dream about a species of hummingbird that flies very low to the ground; dies if looked at too long. You spend your days pointing it out, then begging people to look away.
When asked why you’re a poet, you answer instead why you’re a good eater:
there’s nothing I won’t try / I don’t throw the skins away / and I’ve been known to gnaw a bone.
Originally published in Entropy Magazine