Home

I decided I would get into the Christmas spirit by posting this poem. Hee hee. This poem is for all the mothers out there with their children coming home for the holidays. For the rest of us, this poem is a reminder.

And for anyone who's paying attention, you can be sure I'm not going soft on you.

Home

His car parked in the driveway,
I can almost hear him–imagine him–
sleeping soundly,
breathing between the sheets–
and I know that my walls
are keeping out the world for him tonight.

© 2006 K. M. Camper

Peach Pits

I can't seem to do any "normal" blogging, so it's back to poetry. Which is good, I think. I probably rant too much anyway.

This poem probably is a venting of my experience with violence in relationships recently (not necessarily physical). Somehow it came out in the context of familial relations. I didn't have the particular experiences depicted in the poem, but a lot of my poetry isn't "confessional" in that sense anyway. A lot of my poetry is as much fiction as it is poetry.

Peach pits

Father in cloud of aftershave
counted time
and hid his razor blades in his mouth

Mother grabbed the other side of Oklahoma
and halved all the eggs yoke-running,
leaving the uncooked batter in the oven

They shipped us to our Grandma
who would buy us cantaloupe,
cut it up and give us the seeds,
with Grandpa watching from the back,
tonguing his pipe and smoking her leaves

You tell me you remember after dinner
clanging silverware on empty plates
and eating whatever was left still sitting at the table

And when we both go to our patches,
we can only pick to give each other
Peach pits
which we watch each other barely chew
and swallow.

© 2006 K. M. Camper

My Balloon Life

Balloon existence

I shape
the space around me
like a balloon being blown up
I push out the sides of my existence
I press up against these walls
testing the elasticity
of all around me
to hold–
YES! Resisting
the inevitability
of deflation.

Inverted balloon existence

Shaped into the space around me
latex glove
Who is putting me on their hand?
Whose fingers am I doing the dirty work for?
Stretched and pulled
made to fit
into the spaces–
Deflation? No.
Rubber bands lose their elasticity
and balloons pop.

© Copyright 2006 K. M. Camper

Grandpop's Funeral Poem

Granny asked me to write a poem to read aloud at Grandpop’s funeral and this is what I came up with

“How are you all doing?”
We are—he is not—
the better question
is—how do you spell
hemorrhage?
Because he didn’t die
of leukemia—
but of too much
blood in the brain—
too much blood—
we never thought
he could have too much—
that’s why he went to the hospital every week—
because he didn’t have enough—
enough good blood, enough white
cells and platelets—
but even if he’d had the “normal”
amount, it wouldn’t have been enough
to stop the too much blood,
the bleeding in his brain.

Polaroid shots
on the table, snapped
just weeks before—
how flat a photograph can seem.

We get lost in our heads
trying to remember—
how flat memories can feel—

how real we want the photographs to become.

It’s strange how many times a person can die
inside our own heads,
when we put that tape in the VCR
of our minds and rewind,
the picture comes out fuzzy
and the sound never works right.

We reach out to touch the image
but our fingers are met with a distant
and cool, dusty, slick screen.

© Copyright 2006 by K. M. Camper

Quietly

Quietly

While you were asking why
I was sitting or standing or being
quiet, I was quietly closing
doors, silently shutting
them, and the ones I had closed
I made sure were locked.

(C) Copyright 2005 by K. M. Camper

They found him...

They found him bloated on the shore, his mouth, hands and eyes gaping.

For the drowning man,
it wasn’t the fact
that his lungs
had used up all the oxygen
in his air,
that his body couldn’t help
but gulp
the dirty ocean
‘til that was all there was in him,
‘til he was water logged
and bulging,
but it was the trees and the sky
receding,
the light, the sun and the land
retreating,
his arms and his hands upturned and open,
reaching
for what was more than air,
the water finally siphoning
him off from life.

(C) Copyright 2005 K. M. Camper