{"id":3515,"date":"2022-03-31T13:24:42","date_gmt":"2022-03-31T20:24:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/?p=3515"},"modified":"2024-12-11T12:33:04","modified_gmt":"2024-12-11T20:33:04","slug":"three-poems-by-james-kimbrell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/three-poems-by-james-kimbrell\/","title":{"rendered":"Three Poems by James Kimbrell"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"77\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Found in\u00a0Willow Springs 77<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back to Author Profile<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

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Three Poems by James Kimbrell<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

FIRST PUBLICATION<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

\nI passed out in the barracks
\nafter reading the letter. The ambulance
\ndropped me at Muse Manor.
\nI was the charge of one SGT Laughter.
\nI was all about the heart monitor,
\nuntil they shaved my balls. I called
\nGordon Lish on a pay phone.
\nThanks for taking the poems, I offered,
\nI’m in the hospital now. “Send us
\nsome more,” he said. I swooned.
\nSuffice it to say, this was a day of great
\nswooning. The doctor inquired
\nif I’d done any drugs. Sure, I said,
\nquick to add, but not since joining
\nthe Army. I just got my first
\npoems picked up, I explained,
\nbeaming. He returned with a cup,
\ncommanded me to piss. And this
\nis what it’s like to be famous,
\nI thought, and shrugged it off, and did
\nthe rest of the week on light
\nduty, policing the barracks
\nfor spent cartridges and comic strips.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

APOCALYPTIC LULLABY<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

\nWalking across the snow
\nto the garage behind my house
\nin Mt. Vernon, Ohio,
\ncrooked and cold garage
\nwhere I’d tinker
\nwith this old pawn shop Stratocaster
\ndeep in my post-divorce blues,
\nI did not expect
\nto open the door and find
\na teenage couple going at it
\nlike sheep in a prospect
\nof sun-dappled rye grass
\nbetween the mower and my erstwhile
\nweightlifting bench.
\nIt was sweet how he draped
\nhis stomach, his whole
\ntorso over her back as if to shield
\nher, or himself, from my view.
\nWhat could I do? I said pardon.
\nI closed the door quietly
\nand walked toward
\nthe house and tried not
\nto look out the kitchen window
\nlike the envious creep
\nI didn’t want to become,
\nthe one who, it occurs
\nto me now, might have been trying
\nto tell me something true, ever
\napplicable: there’s always porn.
\nAlways memory. Always
\na good reason to live alone,
\nto stand outside the radius
\nof love and witness
\nthe goings-on of shoulders,
\nbreasts, the inimitable
\nglory and mess of romance
\nand hair and the brackish
\nscent that, an hour
\nlater, lingered there.
\nThe world will never end.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

ELEGY FOR MY MOTHER’S EX-BOYFRIEND<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Let it be said
that Tim’s year was divided
into two seasons: sneakers
and flip flops. Let us
remember that Tim
would sometimes throw a football
with all the requisite grip, angle
and spiral-talk. Let us recall
that for the sake of what was left
of appearances, my mother
never once let him sleep
in her bed; he snored all over
our dog-chewed couch, and in
the mornings when I tiptoed
past him on my way
to school, his jowls
fat as a catcher’s mitt, I never cracked
an empty bottle across that space
where his front teeth
rotted out. Nor did I touch
a struck match to that mole
by his lip, whiskery dot that-he
believed-made him irresistible
to all love-lorn women.
Still, let us remember
sweetness: Tim lying face-down,
mom popping the zits
that dotted his broad, sun-spotted back,
which, though obviously
gross, gets the January photo
in my personal wall calendar
of what love should be,
if such a calendar
could still exist above my kitchen table
junked up with the heretos and
therefores from my
last divorce.
Let us not forget
how my mother would slip
into her red cocktail dress
and Tim would say,
“Your mother is beautiful,”
before getting up
to go dance with someone else.
In fairness, let me
confess that I pedaled
my ten-speed bike
across the Leaf River Bridge
all the way to Tim’s
other woman’s house
and laid with that woman’s daughter
beside the moon-
cold weight
of the propane tank, dumb
with liquor, numb to
the fire ants that we spread
our blanket over until
I stopped for a second
and looked up
because I wondered if
her mother could hear us,
or if Tim might not
have stood in the kitchen,
maybe looked out
the window and saw
my white ass pumping
in the moonlight,
and whispered
to himself, “That’s my boy.”<\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":25234,"featured_media":574,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wpo365_audiences":[],"wpo365_private":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3515"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25234"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3515"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3515\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37598,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3515\/revisions\/37598"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/574"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}