Issue #30.9 Four Poems by Emily Kingery
Bend
“The body doesn’t go with her, the dress doesn’t go with her, but she has value in her head.” – doll appraisal, Antiques Roadshow
She has value in her: pupiled, open, shut and soft as paper money. Traded-for. Like secrets in the
pockets of an unwashed pair of jeans with balled receipts from Chinese restaurants he likes like
her. Her head is pendulumed. It bears a spring. When he unsleeves his records for her, drops
the needle, he has need of it: the weight behind her eyes that lashes lashes, black on porcelain. Back on
his horse he goes; he carousels. He tells her of his Kerouac truth, his shotgun dream, his brute
proclivities: thrift-store tees, loosies, life-of-the- mind and her lashes swoop like lashes of eyes
on video. He pauses for her his image of her in his reel of her with him in his head and says
Why aren’t you fun anymore? Anymore she is an Oregon town of Yellow Pages and dial-up
where the last Blockbuster store hangs on like spider silk. I miss us, he says, as if the close
were not a manufacture, not a head of tiny levers whose inventor said, What if we made her sleep?
And numbered her nape. And then positioned her head bending so she could almost dream.
Begonias
I am unable to understand the forms of my vanity – Frank O’Hara, “To the Harbormaster”
My begonias are the color of your children’s fingertips and dying in the no-good air. There is none I’ve spared
the perfume of your name. I’ve fissured it in my mouth to molecules. You must now think of detonating them,
frantic as notes. Fermataed, luminous eighth-note bulbs strung over my tongue like an ivied beam of a pergola
under a blood moon. You must erase from me the ivy, whir the screws from the wood, imagine quick whose
playground sand my voice now travels to, what chains. I am sorry for chains. What I mean is to ask you, please,
whose turn will it be in the morning to carry the clouds from the faucet, to tremble them down the hall and to
the windowsill? It won’t be your children. Those names I’ve worn, plinked out, the last of your music box. I am
no good with endings. And that opening line– how ugly to ruin what’s tender. They are nothing like anything,
the begonias. They are singular. They beg for my mercy killing, and instead I exhale, like prayers or toxins, your
consonants, your vowels, these vessels still ruddered parallel to mine and splitting behind us the waves.
You, Though You Are Evil
In the clean light of Quicken, It’s just, they say, there is no market
for bread qua bread. No market for casting from a Wonder bag
into a pond of ducks, they say, the market is for pebbles. Small
as in corporate fish tanks, or beneath the boys who once
spun merry-go-rounds so hard the wind made blindfolds of our hair.
Our children are hungry, they say, and the holy data on bread
show crumbs. Let us shake out the toaster, I say, but fiscal
fiscal fiscal ripples the pond like food. We love weight
in our palms, they say, and I think of boys who took my wrists
to prove pebbles thrown into light could fool bats. Return to us
in the black, they say, of stones, the kind to close off tombs.
The women came first in that story, then the Lord, saying, Why are you crying?
Here, too, There is nothing, they say. Nothing here for you to see.
The Way of Things
Sometimes you’re the blank, sometimes you’re the blank we say, gone blank, filling blanks with what passes
for wisdom. Is the truth in the sometimes, the weakening slingshot of ours lobbing blanks at the foreheads of gods
who could press their thumbs to our throats any time? Did we claw through centuries of language for this:
firing blanks at our temples, eating crayon-bright butters, stuffing flowers in Styrofoam blocks and sometimes and
blanks are the best we can do? What if we’re kill-tagged? Or estate-sale tagged? Or we’re tagged and we’re it and
we run, but come on, we can never outrun what’s behind or inside us? What if we’re ships, surrounded by absence
of ships, and we think it’s the eye, we think we can wait but we have the wrong eye, it’s the eye of a needle, and the eye
of a god is both eye and eye, and we wail to him: I, and I, and I? What of sometimes, then? What of blanks we mouth
like candy in church, in love with the slop of our tongues when the way of an eye is through or is no way at all?
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Emily Kingery is the author of Invasives (Finishing Line Press, 2023). Her work appears widely in journals and has been selected for multiple honors and awards. She teaches creative writing and literature at St. Ambrose University and is an emeritus member of the Board of Directors at the Midwest Writing Center, a non-profit supporting writers in the Quad Cities community (mwcqc.org). You can find her at emilykingery.com.
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