poetry quarterly

10th anniversary

Kim Roberts

 

THE FLOOR IS STICKY

Robert is on a mission:
he wants to learn how to say the floor
is sticky in every language,
or rather, every language in which its countrymen
(its women) drink beer in bars.
He thinks it's a good ice-breaker.
He's just learned it in Dutch, and now
I can't get it out of my head:
de vloer plakt, de vloer plakt.

I love the way other languages feel
in the back of my throat, the parts of the mouth
the English doesn't use.
When I was a kid, I used to speak
a gibberish that I thought sounded
convincingly foreign.
I would bicycle to the beach where I could speak it
into the wind loudly without embarrassment.
I thought if I could only live somewhere else

I could leave the me of me behind,
take only the shell of my body
and fill it with someone new.
That's how desperate I was.
I only know a few phrases in French:
I can say I am tired,
You are my little cabbage,
Do you want to go to bed with me tonight?
There's been a terrible accident.

 

 

HOW TO IMAGINE DEAFNESS

Darken your ears until the tunnels
with their intricate clockwork
are sheathed in pitchy calm.
Hum a little blue, to yourself,

but keep it secret. The small bones
will dip delicately, like willow leaves
that merely brush the water's surface,
in their repose. The small hairs

will lie down together like tentacles.
Listen: the lake stops its lapping
repetition of sibilance
(physicist, Sisyphus, sassafras)

and the great snail unfurls itself,
stretches its tongue longingly
toward the distant echo surge
that must be the heart.

 

 

BOY MEETS GIRL

Of all the elements on the Periodic Table,
my favorite is Molybdenum, because I love
to clack its consonants against my teeth.
It's used somehow in the production
of steel, which makes me think of Andrew Carnegie,
which makes me think of big-bellied men in suits.
When the railroad tracks met at Promontory Point, Utah,
that was a kind of love story,
if by love you mean the place where you take over
where I left off.

 

 

SIAMESE TWINS

Chang and Eng shared a liver.
................................................For eight years, they toured America and England
performing acrobatics (although denied entry to France: officials feared their malady
would spread to pregnant women).
......................................................In America, they always appeared with the
image of an eagle and the motto, Union and Liberty, one and inseparable, now and
forever. Like two states in a united nation. Like their home state, North Carolina,

where they retired at 28, became farmers, married sisters, and between them sired 21
children.
..............Emerson once wrote that life cannot be divided or doubled. Any invasion of
its unity would be chaos. The soul is not twin born, but the only begotten...
......................................................................................................................I wonder
how they taught themselves that delicate dance: when to fuse, when to be separate,
how to make their own privacy.
..................................................The newspapers wrote that Eng died of fright,
waking next to his dead brother in the dark. But really Chang died from a cerebral
clot, and when blood pooled in his body, Eng bled to death.
..............................................................................................The body is a mysterious
housing: it brings us pleasure, fails us daily, encloses a fragile sense of self. And
when we die, our other half goes too.

 

 

FOWLER AND WELLS' PHRENOLOGICAL CABINET

Walt Whitman made regular visits.
.......He loved to touch the white porcelain head,
marked off in sections: Appetite, Grief,
Acquisitiveness. Like a butcher's chart

mapping the choicest meats.
.......Whitman knew the body's limits,
and how the mind, a grid
of memory and fear, narrows the range

even further. He hated limits,
.......prudence, high manners,
but he loved a good system
and wanted to learn this one's

steady answers. Why wouldn't
.......what's inside show up on the skin?
The bumps of the head,
small ones like hiccups,

large ones that span three or four
.......categories, elongated heads, ones
that come to a point. His categories
would need new names:

Voluptuousness wears an open collar,
.......Indolence takes the shape
of a cardboard butterfly perched
on his finger. Adhesiveness wants a walk

on the dark docks, a ferry ride across the river.
.......And Sublimity roars like a leaf.
His home in Camden,
where I touched his rubber galoshes,

once overflowed with stacks of paper,
.......a chaos, a fire hazard.
He wouldn't let the hired woman touch it.
Whitman claimed an internal logic

even to Disorder; he loved
.......a good system. In the prison
across the street from his house, men line the windows.
Women on the sidewalk dance, arms above their heads,

hold a pose like Cleopatra, then change.
.......I thought at first: performance art?
Then realized they were spelling
with their bodies, forming the vowels

and the consonants in the air.
.......The body's news comes slowly.
Whitman knew about longing,
he nursed dying Civil War soldiers,

knew the stink of rotting flesh,
.......of pus staining a bandage yellow,
the angel face we wear when we're asleep.
He was large in Sympathy.

He knew something of fate
.......and its strange journey through the grey
thickets of Infelicity and Melancholia,
the temperaments that form in the womb.

 

 

Kim Roberts is the editor of Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and the anthology Full Moon on K Street: Poems About Washington, DC (Plan B Press). The author of three books of poetry, Animal Magnetism (Pearl Editions), The Kimnama (Vrzhu Press) and The Wishbone Galaxy (WWPH), individual poems of hers are also included in over thirty print anthologies, such as Sunken Garden Poetry (Wesleyan University), Letters to the World (Red Hen), The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel (No Tell Books), American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon University Press), Cabin Fever (The Word Works, Inc.), Hungry As We Are (Washington Writers Publishing House), Poetic Voices Without Borders (Gival Press) and The First Yes: Poems About Communicating (Dryad Press), as well as in the webcast "The Poet and The Poem from the Library of Congress." She has published widely in literary journals throughout the US, as well as in Canada, Ireland, France, New Zealand, and Brazil. Her poems have been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, German, and Mandarin.
.......Roberts has been the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the DC Commission for the Arts, and the Humanities Council of Washington, DC. She has been a writer-in-residence at fourteen artist colonies: Soul Mountain Retreat, The Edward Albee Foundation, The Hambidge Center, The Kimmel-Harding-Nelson Center for the Arts, Hidden River Arts, The Artists' Enclave at I-Park, New York Mills Arts Retreat, The Millay Colony for the Arts, The Mesa Refuge, Ragdale Foundation, Ucross Foundation, Blue Mountain Center, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

 

Read more by this author:
Roberts on Walt Whitman: Memorial Issue
Roberts and Dan Vera on DC Author's Houses: Forebears Issue
Kim Roberts on Bethel Literary Society: Literary Organizations Issue
Kim Roberts on DC Poetry Anthologies: Literary Organizations Issue
Kim Roberts on "Langston Hughes in Washington, DC: Conflict and Class," Langston Hughes Tribute Issue
Kim Roberts on Georgia Douglas Johnson: Poetic Ancestors Issue

 

See Kim Roberts's web site:
http://www.kimroberts.org

See Kim Roberts's Wikipedia page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Roberts