Reparations I’ll Pay Piecemeal Until Death | Elly Katz | Poetry Contest 3rd Place Winner - Fall 2024

I converse with

nobody all the time,

a liminal voice singing.

But I write to complete

discourse between lines.

I owe them that—

for stepping up

when life stood me up,

for proving the palpability

of dusk,

of spaces in

between,

that wholeness can be harvested  

out of breaking,

that earnest beauty beats in the ear,

not in the eye,

for being abiding open lines that

never end even when

syntax says they do.

---

 At 27, verging towards a doctorate at Harvard, Elly Katz went for a mundane procedure to stabilize her neck. Somehow, she survived what doctors surmised was unsurvivable: a brainstem stroke secondary to a physician’s needle misplacement. In the wake of the tragedy, she discovered the power of dictation and the bounty of metaphor. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the Stardust Review, the Sacramento Literary Review, the Amsterdam Review, and many others. Her first collection of creative nonfiction, From Scientist to Stroke Survivor: Life Redacted is forthcoming from Lived Places Publishing in Disability Studies (2025). Her first collection of poetry, Instructions for Selling-Off Grief, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books (2025).