Brian Kates

Brian Kates holds a Pulitzer Prize and other awards for his journalism. His book, The Murder of a Shopping Bag Lady, the biography of a homeless woman, won Mystery Writers of America’s Special Edgar Allan Poe Award. His poetry has appeared in Banyan Review, Paterson Literary Review, Third Wednesday, Common Ground Review, Ekphrastic Review, and elsewhere. He was a Best of the Net nominee in 2021 and 2022. He lives with his wife in a house in the woods in the lower Hudson Valley.

The Treachery of Images

She wore his picture in a locket and whenshe opened it and pressed it to her lipsshe knew it wasn’t him, just an image,but she could feel his touch between her breasts.
Some evenings she’d look out the windowand see him home from war with their boy,now just a bulge in her belly, bouncing a ballagainst the brick wall of their apartment house.
Then, that morning, came the knock and awhite-gloved sergeant, a young chaplainholding back tears, Taps, a gun volleyand someone handing her a foldedblue triangle of stars.

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