Katie Naughton

DEBT RITUAL: NANTUCKET

There was something I didn’t know about money until college
until Nantucket pants in pastel chino with whale appliques
worn seriously walking past the dining hall to go out Friday night
but that isn’t money that’s pants that’s signification
okay of Nantucket where I still have never been
but I guess that’s also a romanticized rusticity
as in weathered boards and mismatched wooden furniture
I read the English upper classes only
use bar soap in cracked and ancient cakes
like that there’s nothing more expensive than that
what perches at the absolute fathomless ceaseless continuation
of the ocean unadulterated except by refinement
to the bare possibility of habitation even the linens
are old and linen or so I imagine the type
of money that’s evident so that money is
an aesthetic a quiet language of material
which of course is not money but signification
money’s something else

KATIE NAUGHTON is the author of the chapbook Study (Above/Ground Press) and the as-yet-unpublished manuscript “The Real Ethereal,” a finalist for the 2021 Nightboat Poetry Prize. Her poems appear in jubilat, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Third Coast. She is a doctoral student at SUNY Buffalo, outreach editor at Essay Press, founding editor of Etcetera Poetry, and editor and project manager at the HOW(ever) and the How2 Digital Archive Project.