When Maria's Ex Burns Down the Building We Helped Him Move Into by Kati Goldstein

we laugh about it in the way women laugh when men
have done something we can’t believe or shouldn’t
but in fact do or when we are scared or there is nothing
else to do or we feel somehow responsible. We read
each other excerpts from local news articles and say
someone could have died over and over
first softly, and then we are yelling it as we pound our open
palms on the counter, laughing again. He once held
her cat so gently and fixed her computer and called her
a whore and said he loved her and that no one would ever
believe her over him.



Kati Goldstein is a writer and teacher based in Chicago, Illinois. She received her MFA in Poetry from Columbia College Chicago and her BA in Creative Writing from Colorado College. Her work has appeared in Reality Hands, Voicemail Poems, Phantom Books, and Columbia Poetry Review, among other publications.