Do Something Possible Every Day
This isn’t your only chance to shake a leek in the shitty morning air
& yell to someone that you love them, outraged. Bare your vampire teeth.
It’s your birthday after all & the start of something. Download your heart to this thumb drive. Go in to your office but just sit there & play on your phone.
I’m affixing this sticker to the church steeple. It’s got your name on it.
Bass, salmon, bass, bass, salmon. Last time you felt like this,
they sent you to Oz in the swimmingest tornado. You befriended a man
made of hay & some others along the way. You did not stop. You did not
collect two hundred. This isn’t your only chance to open your lockscreen
& delete your favorite app; to open your planner & make a certain list
of not only what you need to do today but also what can get done, considering
all the howling at the sun that needs to happen before the honors event
on the President’s lawn. Monday is never Tuesday anymore. They have risen
the retirement age in France & the country is on fire. Tennessee has been overrun
by teenagers & if you had any sense, you’d take your leek, thrust it to the sky
in sword-like fashion & join them. Instead you’re wondering
whether or not to harvest the bamboo shoots from the lawn & invite a man
to join you tomorrow for dinner, but something your Mom said won’t go away
& even though it won’t leave you, you can’t share it. Not even here,
with an impossible group of strangers, none of whom have any idea
how alien your tincan heart can be.
Make Me a Diamond
Trace a water line
on the ledge of the tub
& call this side here,
this side home. Witness
the folding chairs’ rusted brawl
on the front lawn, tragically unmown.
When did you know? Who isn’t tired
of answering this question.
I’d give back every iris,
every hallelujah rose, I’d never
pull a daisy or buttercup
up from the grass again,
I’d return the azaleas
in their blazing gem-pink glory
to have her meet my daughter pre-masks
& pre-stroke, more than that once—outside,
the white in her hair final & the words & names
strangled in her throat, replaced with a laugh
& tears in her eyes. I think she thinks
she’s going to die, I said to my Mom,
who didn’t tell me what I didn’t want to hear,
that in too many ways, she already had.
Can you make me a diamond? I ask my daughter
whose handful of pink play doh needs direction.
Don’t sneak on me & be quiet, she says.
When did you know? I refuse knowing,
an easier task from far away. Blood lines
are red & invisible. Pipelines are buried
& invisible. The lines on my forehead crease
with the weight of every pink diamond squashed back
to tired shapelessness. The blades here
are grass & growing home.
The Lovers
for Philly, after James Boyle’s The Lovers, after Rodin’s La Porte l’Enfer
in this tarot deck are Rodin’s The Kiss, or, in truth,
Philadelphia’s marble replica—& now I’m on about what discerns statue
from sculpture, how perhaps I should be drawn
to The Thinker instead if only for its initial name
or how it existed as part to whole
until it caught the eye of the foundrymen,
then the artist himself. But The Kiss emblemizes the city for me
despite its duplicity— the original in France, the entwined lovers I know
made only after Rodin’s death.
Another of my ova dies
today. I want to bloody my lips with it,
kiss or recreate it in plaster, terracotta, bronze, give it life eternal.
I want to know more of the swell of eggs left clustered inside me & waiting, not what happens when one is chosen—
to perish or produce— but what they are like now: what happens before the kiss, not what the kiss may prefigure.
not how over time, bronze tarnishes, turns suddenly a slick green, a color we fail to notice
especially when it’s spring, & everywhere.
Kimberly Ann Southwick (she/her) is an assistant Professor of creative writing and English at Jacksonville State University in Alabama, where she lives with her daughter, Esmé, and their dog, Nova. She is the author of the debut full-length poetry collection Orchid Alpha (Trembling Pillow Press). Southwick is the founder and editor-in-chief of the literary-arts journal Gigantic Sequins, founded in 2009 and beginning in 2026 on a semi-permanent hiatus. She is a member-at-large on the board of the Emily Dickinson International Society. Her work can be found in American Poetry Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, Fuckus, Birdcoat Quarterly, among others. Visit kimberlyannsouthwick.com for more.
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