Category: Uncategorized
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My Grandmother Speaks of Beauty
I could eat them with a spoon Herman would say every time he drove the tractor over and saw them playing on the red dirt bank: they’d climb up and up and slide down so fast they wore their palms raw stopping. Suppose there was a pageant among them, he…
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Kali Kali Kali
for Clayton Lockett, died April 29, 2014 for J.V. Brown, died March 7, 2014 for Iris, who was never born Kali descended and asked me to describe her in three words. I said goddess of destruction. She said goddess of time and change. I said that’s five words. She…
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Earth Day Poem for Amelia
I was going to tell the story of how you drew a sign that read globl warming is hapning please help with two circular, frowning polar bears and speech bubbles: Help! and how I made twelve copies of the sign and spent an evening helping you post them around the…
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If
IF The mind wants everything that isn’t. Its running list of alternatives is constant and vivid: I would have been a choreographer in a bigger city if I’d had more talent as a dancer or a farmer if I’d loved the land better. If I hadn’t watched the video of…
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After a Stomach Bug
Every regular day is a blessing. Thank you, universe, that I am not kneeling over a toilet bowl vomiting. Such violence, over for now, all surfaces Cloroxed. I am free, for awhile, to sip fizzy water and stroll the sidewalks of the living. The daffodils are almost blooming—what a paradise,…
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The Distance Between Planets
When I read the news that no one will sit next to Tiffany Trump during fashion week, I feel the way I felt when I learned my daughter’s school was selling valentines to be delivered during the school day to kids whose parents or friends had bought them. Imagine waiting…
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Poem to February
Awhile back I swore I was going to try harder to love more. It’s going poorly. I hate February because it’s the month my daughter almost died in as a toddler. What doctors thought was a stomach bug was a rare strep germ abscessing in her belly. It’s the month…
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Red Light Green Light
When the comedian on morning radio makes a joke about white women who think the universe is telling them something I think I would quit— everything— if I could. The traffic’s just-before-rush-hour pattern, cars darting lane to lane, all speed and brake, mirrors my constant rearrangement of the day’s dull…
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Insomnia
The world won’t recede. Today’s small complications, minor irritations, inconsequential decisions are magnified 1000 x by my mind turned stalwart nocturnal animal with powerful night vision. My imagination spotlights future funerals like scenes on a stage. I gaslight myself. Any real or larger problem is apocalyptic in the dark. Tomorrow,…
Kimberly O'Connor 