A bridge, a pow-wow,
something worthy of champagne.
A word, alright? A goddamn guarantee.
This life is one long filibuster.
And on it went for some time,
fantasy the only presence
she could tolerate. She called this “needing space.”
Interminable sound: neighbor’s radio,
woodpecker battering the chimney cap,
Juicy Fruit sprong in her own jaw.
Through the strange, tipped out window,
she watched black rain disappear.
I need to know what housewives know,
without the house, without the husband.
Einstein sutured now to now
with an ellipsis in the carpet.
At least, this was the story she made up.
How else could he get all the way round
on those big thoughts, ideas nobody
has the time or quiet to think?
The way you chewed and swallowed whole days,
tossed my lucky penny into the river.
I’d forgotten, until yesterday’s revelation,
like a trinket-filled suitcase yawning with exotica:
wing feather of a White-plumed Antbird;
squirrel-ruined midnight crepe de chine.
Tin monkey, empty cup, rusted workings jarred,
grind-open, ting-shut of an ear-to-ear, Chiclet grin.
Spatulate nails, unfashionably long.
Immaculate, dull as a cow.
Wooden and flat as a plank I might walk
were I a scurrilous scalawag and her power absolute.
Flat-footed trudger. Unstylish set of elbows.
Shrieky, plastic laugh,
sour as a pinched lemon,
juice sliding into a paper-cut.
Though less direct.
Necky as an orchid, rare and alien,
run-off pooling around stones
thick in moss she scrubs away
with a bleach-dipped brush.
The whys she milks as she removes her wig
dissolve: no one left to meet my eye.
Night siphons off the day, that hiss
could be the hiss of dropping leaves. She listens.
The world reels toward crusted-in-ice.
Kimberly McClintock’s poetry has been anthologized in Write, I See (2014), a publication of the Art Student’s League of Denver, Joys of the Table: An Anthology of Poems on Food and Eating (2015), and has appeared or is forthcoming in Apeiron Review, Kindred Magazine, Glassworks, Bird’s Thumb and Chattahoochee Review, among others. She received an MFA from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, and was the 2009 recipient of the Larry Levis Post-Graduate Fellowship. A native of southern New Jersey, she currently makes her home in Colorado.
–Art by Rona Keller