Kathleen Rooney
Cinquain For How, Because It Happened To Be On My Kindle, I Read My Man Jeeves By P.G. Wodehouse In India And Found It Hilarious
Wondered
whether, under
capitalism, we
are all valets to the idle
wealthy.
Cinquain For How When I Travel Abroad, I Think About Whether I’m In A Place My Mom Would Visit Or Not
This one?
Not. But if she
did? Peacocks at a road-
side pit stop. Chai in terra cot-
ta pots.
Cinquain For How, At The Taj Mahal, White Marble Monument To Eternal Love, The Guide Had Each Of Us Pose On The Princess Di Bench For A Photo
In the
scrum, someone, some
random creepy man, grabbed
my ass with both hands. Just fully
honked it.
Cinquain For How India Is The Most Populous Country On The Globe With 1.4 Billion People, Which Means That There Is More Of Everything, Including Poverty
Beggars
pointing spindly
fingers at their mouths, hawk-
ing statues—who they resemble—
of gods.
Cinquain For How One Morning, We Were Doing Yoga Outside And I Heard A Lot Of Little Birds Babbling In The Jungle, And When I Looked Them Up, I Learned They’re Called Jungle Babblers And Wondered If The Brits Were Overwhelmed By The Species Diversity In The Subcontinent And Just Felt Like They Had To Name Everything Really Fast
[Sees bird
pooping from tree]
Tree pooper! New species!
Write it up, gov! Jolly good cheer-
io.
Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, and a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a team of poets and their typewriters who compose commissioned poetry on demand. She is the author, most recently, of the novels Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk and Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey. Her latest poetry collection Where Are the Snows, winner of the XJ Kennedy Prize, was released in Fall of 2022 by Texas Review Press and her latest novel, From Dust to Stardust, came out in September 2023. Her debut picture book Leaf Town Forever, co-written with her sister, Beth Rooney, is forthcoming with University of Minnesota Press in the fall of 2025. She lives in Chicago and teaches at DePaul.
