Kimberly L. Becker
has recent or forthcoming publications in 2River, Borderlands, Ghoti Magazine, Poemeleon, Poems Niederngasse, Snowy Egret and elsewhere online and in print. Her poems also inspired the dance “For a Lady Called Kim” choreographed by Dr. Lenette Perra, Ballet Master and Resident Choreographer of TCDE.
The recipient of a fellowship in fiction from the New Jersey State Arts Council, Kim’s short fiction has appeared in Parting Gifts. She holds degrees from UNC-Chapel Hill (BA in English with highest honors in creative writing, MA in German) and Virginia Seminary (MDiv). A Southerner of European and Cherokee descent, she lives in the Washington, D.C. metro area, but prefers the Blue Ridge to the Beltway. Email
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Axis
On a rainy Saturday
we visit the observatory.
It isn’t operational anymore,
but once a year it’s open for a tour.
Because it’s in our neighborhood,
we figure it would be good
to go and check it out.
It’s different than we thought
it would be. For instance,
the pagoda-shaped structure at a distance
was not, as we imagined, unperched
like the steeple from a fallen church.
It is, we learn, the Meridian or Azimuth
Marker and served to align the zenith
telescope that measured the earth’s wobble on its axis.
Another couple enters and asks us
what they’ve missed. The guide
starts over, only slightly snide,
but who can blame him?
We’ve come here on a whim
to hear the complex compressed;
universal mysteries can’t be addressed
so blithely. Yet we intuit
that the wobble of the planet
is not unlike the shaky balance
in a marriage, that celestial dance.
My husband and I leave on a cue
of eyes as the guide begins anew
with what we’ve heard before.
We weave home under one umbrella as it starts to pour.
Breakage
At the sink a dizzy spell spills
the glass from my hand,
breaking it, and the sound
prousts me into remembering two glasses.
One fell towards speech.
The other into lack.
When you went slack with stroke
your heavy-bottomed Old Fashioned glass
thudded into sponge of Florida grass,
but didn’t break.
Your mouth worked as you tried to speak.
When, at five, I told my best friend’s parents
that my own were separating
I didn’t think I knew the meaning of that word,
but heard response of shattered glass in sink
and registered the force of a word
to stun and break.
And, now, to make.
Valves
I have finally closed off from you.
I have shut fast the valves of my heart.
Like those bi-valved creatures in pastel shells
that feel with their foot for a purchase of sand,
I feel the pull of the receding tide, the past,
and burrow
fast
and deep
down
and away
from
the memory
of you
only to hit
the beach of your palm
that held me all along.
DEAF
CHILD
informs the school-bus yellow sign.
She skates in silence on the dead end road
and neither heeds the cars that come
within a shark’s breadth of her form
nor hears the din of mother’s dunning her to dinner,
but feels the thunder and points to the leavening sky
before the storm is realized in our eyes.
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