Four Poems by Nicole F. Kimball

 

The Poet

He gathered stories along his life just to grow up and be a poet. 

Retelling of trauma muted on street armpits, the sound muted 

and then forced with the waah wah wahh-ing doors of salt and grease.  

In August the bees would swell around their mother honey, 

bruising the flowers with their flying talons.

The Poet would stand there on a city block and grieve,

people passing by would see his sweat stains 

and assume his soul to be a water faucet willing to cleanse their dirty knives 

and air them out in red clotting sheets. 

Still, he saw no point in getting bare, the dirt from a hard life 

meant he was a great poet. Day by day his clothes dwindled down as he 

bleated on with the voice of a ghost until finally, 

he was bare enough to sleep among the anesthetized, the river, the fishes. 

Please! Does anyone have a shirt I can warm myself with, 

possibly a tablecloth or a large paper napkin? 

The strangers would wobble down the crooked road,

clinging to their clothing as though it was their own child. 

At last The Poet’s eye would turn soft and dull. 

He wondered who it was telling him stories all along.

The Only Grief

 

The only grief stronger than death is loss.  

Loss is carving with through the night, a raft of stars,

but with one missing. Death knows exactly where it hurts, and still–

you would choose to continue on with life unprotected. 

Death protects itself with the final crisp of fever crushing bones, 

impossible for a lover to spot the heart in the thickets 

of the rib cage that once held an animal. Now a carnivore 

is up there with the stars, grieving. Beating.

Grief is the light of day growing pulpy melons 

for new mouths to enjoy atop a cemetery 

where life can rest and no more limbs can grow. 

To lose is to remember the times we think forgetting would be best. 

The bare, the raw– memory shrinking like tinfoil into the distance, 

becoming the bereaved singularity. 

Loss is going through life trying to make things they’re not. 

Shaving the beard that will always come back, tapping the kidneys 

to warn them of dialysis.  

Death is a complete thought inside a book with a cover. 

Loss is watching the person who ate organic chunks of you 

spoon-feed your enemy with your sorrow.

Ode to Sour

 

If you unzip a lemon like a surgeon slicing a coin purse, 

watch it shimmy from shadow to yellowing youth-

Watch it froth in rabies and benzoyl peroxide, a lice picker 

tweezing seeds to make teeth for the sugar skulls of Cinco De Mayo-

If you bite into its years of collective memory;

the sour tree chopping, mother shanking spit and greening heart- 

If the tree and lemon is just like the apple and tree, 

falling not far from where the rotting will eventually be–

Seasoned with God's greatest depression,

Wasting in forbidden flesh, sleeping in its own filth and funk–

If the lemon doesn’t know where the barbs end and pain begins- 

would you open a child’s mouth and teach him of sour? 

Would you remember the time your mother taught you about fruit ?

Squeezed it in your hand to make lemons from lemonade?

Bloom

By 7am my bloom began to twitch. I laid with her, 

the Earth that I bathe daily, like a mother to her tethered dragon. 

My bald feet tumbled in spools. 

Like any good dyslexic gardener, I dug a grave for all the sweet beets 

while telling them goodnight and good mourning in hopes of them lasting forever. 

A warm rash was heavy in the grave. 

Who was I to request my own love? 

Who was I to question it? We must get on with living, to get on with nature dying—

Love called, the only gauze. Fogged over the blinking bulb, my garden was there to mulch and belly. 

Once a young darkness I refused to consume, 

a young chromatic lily, blue 

in the arctic infatuation of suffering. 

Silvered slivered orchid snow, flowered and then hatched to become a newness

 I could not accept—

daffodil, round flower, bear for me what I am not.  

Like the water song that flies without knowing of the wing, 

that humming mandatory water bodyborn to defy a world the fire.

Lurch, summer pebble weather, deep inside the language of all the trees;

what I suspect to be the worst of it. Wormwood sometimes grows 

deeply when there is a reason for rain. A reason to question 

the pen of ordinary ink, a world where a fingerprint is left at the tip of the match— 

beginning with that orchid mother planted hours ago.

Nicole F. Kimball is an emerging poet and artist. She enjoys spending time with her husband and Chihuahua named Tinkerbelle.