Kathrine Varnes

4VC51N6 817C#

Yes, I know I’ve been her.
I have been her kind
in the back of the wagon, as Sexton said.
It all happens so fast, you can’t imagine
those uniforms and voices point at you.

Pick the wrong command, you won’t
even hear your name as it becomes
a rallying cry. All your life.
All your life, you never checked the box
for martyr. I wish you pumped your fist in the air

instead of blood to nowhere. Your name
and the epithet we share take turns
in wobbly pirouettes. It’s what they say
to justify bullet slap and shackles
you said no to. You said

I’m not mad at you, Dude.
As if his orders had any reason.
As if he thought you were a person.
He knows your name, now
a stone on his tongue. It will not.

It will not be muttered
like a curse. He must swallow it
or sing it skipping over water
for the mother and the poet
who cannot answer. He must sit

in a room barren or full
of comfortable chairs and couches.
Feel the hands patting his shoulder.
All he can hear. Listen.
It’s the sound of falling stones.


Kathrine's YouTube reading of "4vc51n6 817c#"


Kathrine confesses: "On January 7th, 2026, an ICE agent shot Renée Nicole Macklin Good, a few minutes away from the school where she dropped off her 6-year-old son. Immediately after killing her, the agent uttered the title of this poem. This poem is part elegy, part curse."

Kathrine Varnes is the author of a book of poems, The Paragon, and co-editor with Annie Finch of An Exaltation of Forms. Her last publication included three poems in Continuum, ed. Marlena Buczek Smith, in which poets respond to works created by visual artists. She has poems forthcoming in Chiron Review and The World We See, an anthology edited by Lauren Slaughter. Varnes teaches poetry and writing at SUNY's Fashion Institute in Manhattan and lives in Larchmont, New York.