Kathryn Gahl

CONTACT:
Website: www.kathryngahl.com
Email: kathryngahl@gmail.com

BIO:
Kathryn Gahl, who holds dual degrees in English and nursing, is a brightly lit performer whose use of language reaches out and grabs an audience. Her multi-genre writing, deeply rooted in everyday life, combines a certain human pathos with quick wit and smile-worthy lines. Her works appear in three anthologies and over fifty journals, with awards from Glimmer Train, Margie, Chautauqua, Rosebud, The Mill, Talking Writing,The Hal Prize, New Millennium Writings, and Wisconsin People & Ideas. In 2019 The Council of Wisconsin Writers awarded her the Lorine Niedecker Poetry Award. An avid ballroom dancer, she believes in the power of red lipstick, deep sleep, and compassion.

PUBLICATIONS:
Hard Life, Hard Love, Dancing Girl Press, 2022
Messengers of the Gods: New & Selected Poems, Cornerstone Press, April 2022
Life Drawing Class, 2009, Cottage Corollary
The Velocity of Love (Water’s Edge Press, 2020)
Messengers of the Gods: New & Selected Poems (Cornerstone Press, forthcoming 2022)

Poetry

Slow Dancing

When the earth started its pull
on my father,
he went, a willow would,
shoulders cracking,
knees cranky—where’s the chair—
unless a big band came to town
laid reality at his feet
each ankle and toe-tapping beat
asked for a dance
and got its way, he
nothing but a wisp of wheat
able to get up the Irish
in my mother, took her
across the floor, smoothed
her feathers except
the morning he found her on the floor, eyes
glassy from a stroke,
he asked for one more 
dance and she gave
him a stare,
a look of something longed for
or lost.

Appeared in Portage Magazine 2019