Katie Berta
[“Clean up your life”]
“Clean up your life” is one way of telling a person that their liver is going bad with drink and their kidneys are going bad from the aspirin they chew and their face is aging double-time, like that video of a decomposing fox they made you watch in college ecology, and you feel a little like the middle of that fox, which sags in as his body loses the water that puffs it out and makes it a solid thing, like the fox just as it starts to sag, before you realize how bad things are going to get. And though you aren’t yet dead, you start thinking of yourself and everyone around as pre-dead, as in the phase that directly precedes death, which is, i.e., life, people are quick to point out, but this is a way of looking at the world, not, per se, a reflection of what is the most efficiently, absolutely accurate. Though it is accurate, in a way, to look at life as death, you counter. Accurate, but not quite—, never really—. And the actual thing is, people usually don’t clean up their lives, or they do and then everything falls apart again. The weight they lost inches back in, fractions of a pound a day, or they buy a bottle just to keep, put it on the back shelf where it calls out for years and then is consumed. Statistically, we’re all doomed—it has been modeled and algorithmed and, more than that, stuffed down into every crevice of the soul, where it, too, calls out, like a warning shouted from far away. You turn your head to look toward the sound.
Katie Berta is the author of retribution forthcoming, winner of the 2024 Hollis Summer Prize from Ohio University Press. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Cincinnati Review, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She has received a residency from Millay Arts, fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the Virginia G. Piper Center, and an Iowa Review Award. She is managing editor of The Iowa Review.