Kate Stoltzfus Publishes Two Poems on Appetite, Care, and the Unsettling Work of Growing Up

Electric Literature has published two poems by Kate Stoltzfus, “Fallen Deer by the Dam” and “I Teach My Brother How to Make Applesauce,” in a pairing that links natural violence with domestic instruction. The poems, appearing together on the magazine’s site, circle questions of hunger, memory, family life, and the changes that come with growing up.

In “Fallen Deer by the Dam,” the scene is stark: a dog is eating a deer near the water. The speaker’s attention stays fixed on what can and cannot be seen, on the animal’s missing belly, on the bloodiness of the moment, and on the limits of human assumption. The dog is described as a “good boy,” but the poem resists a simple moral reading, reminding readers that appetite and injury belong to the same world and that the animals involved understand each other’s terms more clearly than people do.

The poem’s emotional force comes from its refusal to tidy the scene. The dog has a collar and is imagined as belonging to a home, yet he remains with the deer rather than simply returning when called. That tension between household comfort and wilderness fact gives the poem its charge. What looks, from a distance, like disorder is presented as part of a balance that is “bloodier than we think.”

The second poem shifts from the woods to a kitchen, but it keeps the same attention to transformation. In “I Teach My Brother How to Make Applesauce,” the speaker addresses a brother and returns to childhood: the family gathering fruit, a younger sister running among the trees, the body changing with time. Apples are picked, carried inside, and cooked down into sauce, and the process becomes a way of thinking about what children inherit, what seasons take away, and how sweetness is made through patience.

Where the first poem is grounded in physical aftermath, the second turns ordinary household labor into a model for understanding growth. The making of applesauce becomes a small lesson in endurance: boil, wait, and let the skins split. The poem suggests that the bitter parts of life can soften, but only after time has done its work. That sense of slow alteration gives the piece its emotional texture and ties it to the speaker’s memories of family and childhood.

Published together, the poems show Stoltzfus working across different registers while holding onto a shared concern with bodies, sustenance, and change. One poem watches a predatory act in the open air; the other transforms a familiar kitchen practice into a meditation on what it means to mature. Both ask readers to consider how closeness to life also means closeness to damage, and how care can exist beside consumption.

The publication also fits Electric Literature’s ongoing mix of fiction, essays, and poetry, with the site highlighting new work for readers following contemporary literary voices. For Stoltzfus, the pairing offers two distinct but resonant lenses on the same underlying problem: how to name the difficult, messy facts of living without separating them from tenderness. The poems leave that question open, but they make clear that sweetness and blood are never very far apart.