Casey FitzSimons
Casey FitzSimons is a frequent reader at San Francisco Bay Area venues. Her poems have appeared in print and online in The Massachusetts Review, Red Wheelbarrow, Midwest Quarterly, Mezzo Cammin, and others. She has work forthcoming in the Cape Cod Poetry Review, River Poets Journal, the Eyedrum Periodically Anthology, and the Marin Anthology. She has placed first in poetry at Mendocino Coast Writers Conference and Ina Coolbrith Circle, and second at the Soul-making Keats Sonnet Competition and the Maggi H. Meyer Contest sponsored by Bay Area Poets Coalition. She has published 12 chapbooks, including Pushing Sky Aside (2016) and The Sharp Edges of Knowing (2015). Casey taught art in San Francisco for many years. Her reviews of Bay Area exhibitions frequently appeared in Artweek, and her studio drawing book, Serious Drawing, was published by Prentice Hall. She has a master’s degree in Fine Arts from San José State University.
Author Website
Reliquary
As I enter the house, the floor
creaks over dry joists, announcing
my presence on the carpet. Memory
lurks, but hidden and harmless, last soot
settling in disintegrating weave. But my hand
on the smooth pull, the rattle as I
open the kitchen drawer, disturbs
unfinished conversations, the repose of
lapsed glances. Like the rib cage of a small saint,
the eggbeater rests in arid air, insensible
to veneration. I’m reluctant to rouse
the past it touches. Lifting this utensil now,
extricating the carrot peeler that impales it like
a lance, would stir to alertness
the indignation of neglect, might demand
engagement. Nothing here I want, I say
to the agent. My own echoes decaying
in other rooms meet the foot-scrape of grit
on porous linoleum. Okay, then, he says.