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Kimberly White’s latest novel is Waterfall Girls (CLASH Books, 2021).  Her poetry has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Main Street Rag, Cream City Review, and other journals and anthologies. She is the author of four chapbooks, Penelope, A Reachable Tibet, The Daily Diaries of Death, and Letters to a Dead Man; as well as two other novels: Bandy’s Restola, and Hotel Tarantula.  She also dabbles in other arts, and spends most of her time in Northern California with her pens and papers and massive collection of Tarot decks. 

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Introduction

For the most part, I would rather let the poetry speak for itself.  Once it’s written and released to the world, the poem is no longer a part of me, at the same time it will aways be a part of me.  I am amazed at the things others see in a poem, things I had no idea I put there, and I never want to interfere with someone else’s interpretation and takeaway. Every poet knows what they’re saying, but they don’t know what they’ve really said until someone else reflects it back to them. [KW]

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Kimberly White: Seven Poems

POSTCARD FROM A CHEATING WOMAN

The desk clerk in this crass motel is not fooled by me, as if
the stink of infidelity precedes me. Maybe she’s the owner,
there is something about her that is more invested than an
employee, something that doesn’t have to be personable or look
me in the eye to keep this job. Maybe she was me, once, before
the flesh of her round face withered and sank, before her fingers
grew too twisted to snap at a man. Maybe she is me, stepped
back from my dismal future to hold up a dirty mirror.

By the way she disregards me as she pecks her grimy keyboard,
it’s clear that I make no more imprint than is needed to give me
a room key. Rheumy-eyed, her shaky hand lifts a stained primrose
teacup for a weary sip, sets it down on a mismatched diner saucer,
where it sits embarrassed to be the only one of us whose
beauty survives the stains.

CATALOGUE OF DUST MOTES

Be careful walking through my house, dust will get in your
eyes. Open a book which still smells of the shop it came
from and disturb dust composed of the book’s deteriorating
cover and other remnants brought along from the shop, the
microdander of a cat who is now a ghost, a shockingly inept
fireplace incident, springwind pollen and muddy footprints
sucked in by the fan. Once in a while, I give the vacuum
a spin to see if it still works but lazy as I am, it kicks up more
than it sucks: decayed visions born of artistic envy and dead
before birth, palettes of aborted bits and strings of memories
that are more than my own. A dirty house is just a shield.
Dust bears seeds which grow to grace.

DIRTY MIRROR

I know the other word for mirror
is shame
Another word for shame
is obedience,
the chain which binds
growth to gravestone.
And in my mirror,
the garden is dry,
the dry rose petals scatter
with dust spread by an ill wind

Even the cactus chokes
in its dry dirt

In my mirror,
the clothes on the floor
were not dropped by you,
even when I chose
to empty my own pockets
and yours,
looking for holes and lose threads
with which to mend them.

Once in another mirror,
I saw a murderer’s face
behind the knife used
to open a throat.
Now, in this mirror,
that knife scar
bisects my own throat.

Forgive me, I say to the scar,
to the knife in that other mirror
Forgive me, to the starving garden,
the untrimmed trees.

My enemy has become me,
put the knife in my own hand,
stolen the river
of my baptism,
keeps my throat open and
bleeding in perpetual sin,
blood of my blood
drying in the mirror.

AN EARLY FORM OF WATER

Go back and count the shipwrecks in the Styx, before Charon’s
boat was hired. It’s a contentious river, thick with rot and darkness,
with greedy snatching hands. Did they have to die a second time
when the boats went down, then make another crossing with the next
Boatman, or are they still down there, twice dead and unfindable in
that pre-primordial swamp?

On the bus to my other job, well after dark, sit next to someone who’s
made this trip more days than I’ve been alive. He wears every day like
an old story in his eyes, and I feel him ready to steal mine. Windowglass
distorts the cold night outside, unable to hold its shapes for the passage
of our bus. The glossary of passengers in our busstream is our shared
bloodstream, each in transit to our assigned otherworlds. Bus driver,
Boatman, who are we to assume identities on their behalf when nothing
we do is completely right?

Who am I to question riverboat gods as my mineral elements decay and
become one with tis rotting river darkness? In this river that washes my
ghosts clean, the eyes of the Boatman do not invite doubts. I will shut my
own eyes until they reopen themselves and then I will make a wish for you,
before I drift on as my Boatman intends. I am glad to be done with Time,
and its tricksters are glad to be done with me.

LUNACY AND ECSTASY

I left a window open and something leaked in, not sure
but it could be either moon-bred or sun-born, some kind
of blue myth which has forgotten itself, looking for me to
wake it up. Remind it of its place in its pantheon. Assuming
I will recognize the snake that bit it and put it to sleep, ready
to steal any antivenom I might possess. Synergy, that’s what
it says, but I am not composed of the same mineral elements
and my snakes are not their snakes. The window is still open,
they’re free to go, to slip through someone else’s window, one
with a clearer view of this liquid world, if any window can be
so clean.

(originally published in Cholla Needles 98)

WIND SCARS

Wind shift changes the key of the chimes, invites a
different choir. Hand of a wind god slaps me right
off the road, static like spiders hatching under my skin.
Cracks are opened and forced apart, wind whistles through,
corrosive breath wheezes with sounds of lost invocations
and spent prayers, dust of degraded woods and broken roads
where wind takes the helm with unquiet grace in the wake of
swirling ghosts, of things left to rot, blown miles from their
graves. I have rearranged myself by way of the wind to mirror
its shifts, change with its keys, shred the maps it makes as soon
as they are drawn. Wind gods slap me down, lift me up again,
blow me back into history and make me live it all again and again
from a new direction each time. Wind directions are endless.

(originally published in Eunonia Review)

INVENTORY OF DULL KNIVES

Carry it high, this knife
Doesn’t matter how dull
I can I will
bluff by brandishment,
by force of my
blatant conviction

Try me.

Don’t try me.

*

You can ask how I sleep
but no one is entitled
to answers

I and my sleep
almost never get along,
Such is for no one
to dissect, to judge.

*

Go ahead, spy on me
Count the knives in my kitchen
the knife in my purse
the blade of my tongue
fingernails only an angry woman
can deploy
I hope what you see
through my dirty window
scares you and if it doesn’t,
you’re a fool

*

Soft places are deceptive
as are dull knives

my teeth grind like knives
chew up my dreams
like whetstones, gravestones
cracked and dulled with use
beyond its sustainable structure

*

Draw the dull blade
across the stone

read the sparks
as they blaze

tiny constellations
combust and fly and die

destroy and reconstruct

*

Heavy prices are paid
for good knives

Even when dull,
they find their ways
into every
nook and cranny

*

I wave my dull knives
in the wind

the wind doesn’t care
if they’re dull

I,
the wind,
my knives,
we speak
the same
language.

*

Precision is more
than a physical blade.
Sometimes,
a symbol is
all the sharpener
needed.

No knife is ever as sharp
as element.

Water sharpens more
than just knives.

*

My dull knives dig
for what was left behind

by others, by me

I can learn
from others’ mistakes
I don’t need to be cut
to bleed

*

I know what I carve
in my dreams
I know what is engraved
even when I remember
nothing else

true voices
cut the air
like knives

*

Only a fool with a knife
can cut so deep

I nurture my cuts
shape my scars
wear the alphabet
of history
on my skin

*

My eyes cut like knives
pierce you
without words

then again,
some knives heal
faster than they cut

*

If my knife doesn’t get you,
someone else’s will

I know this,
because I stitch up
the wounds.

Because their confessions
tell less than their wounds
and I, with needle and thread,
am the keeper
of their myths.

*

Even my dull knife
cuts through the bone,
the delicate membrane
of memory
dead and alive

Touch me with it,
too dull to pierce skin
unless pushed
yet sharp enough
to stigmatize

my hands my feet,
half-severed
at the ribs,
that which cuts
to the bone
also breaks,
sharp or dull

I keep the blade
broken off in me
The knifebone
of a new scar
spells another history
on my skin.

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