Cindy King
Poetry
Cindy King’s work appears in The Sun, Callaloo, Prairie Schooner, Gettysburg Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Slowdown, Verse Daily, River Styx, Cincinnati Review, North American Review, and elsewhere. Her book, Zoonotic, is forthcoming from Tinderbox Editions in 2020. Easy Street, her chapbook, is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press. She currently lives in St. George, Utah, where she is an assistant professor of creative writing at Dixie State University and faculty editor of The Southern Quill.
Capacitor (Be Mine)
Call us anything: spirits, specters, spooks—
Say what you will about ghosts & widows:
that we don’t exist, we’re invisible,
that we go naked under the sheets,
and leave pornography in little free libraries.
Oh, how we messed with Ms. O’Keeffe
until she ditched mimesis for yonic flowers—
Sweet ruin of a decaying arrangement,
biological clock shocked by the red pulse of time…
Oh, how we would take your camera
and keep it on the nightstand
next to our bed. How we would take you
in your Subaru, between dashboard
and bucket seats—despite red dirt
and lousy music.
Serendipity, acne, nothing connecting to nothing.
Poltergeistly, wet-palmed, the mopey joy
of mumbling the same words
because they never come out quite right.
Pretty much everything moves at erosion speed;
those blemishes on the blue sky are called clouds.
The world’s mostly tweetups, irreconcilable
differences, legal separations, and restraining orders.
Forever after, the taxes happily unprepared. Our backs
bent beautifully like the workers at fulfillment centers.
Everyone’s always endorsing accuracy over precision—
closeness of the measurements to a specific value,
over closeness of the measurements to each other.
Arrows missing hearts, bypassing bodies altogether.
(Would it help to get a bow?)
Or should we keep throwing them
and throwing, everly happy, everly after.
Listen: