Great Kills Review
Winter
2008 – Volume II, issue 1
|
Kim Triedman |
Poorly lit
When
I was a kid maybe
8
or 10
or 15 I used to think
that life was pretty perfect,
my life, that is,
the loving parents,
good hair,
etc. but what I
really couldn’t understand
at the time
was the way
Sunday
evenings
made me want
to die:
the quiet the quiet
the overhead lights in every
room of the house
too dim or
too bright and
my mother upstairs
napping
far away under
her favorite afghan.
I
should have known then
what I
know now, that
that is where my
future was forming,
not in the straight A’s
straight teeth not in
the good graces
god or anyone else
had thought to bestow
but in the belly
of those long, poorly-
lit Sunday evenings, under
the nasty blue glow
of a TV
that nobody
was watching.
Alzheimer’s Unit,
March 2008
(for John)
Everything
must have its
place beneath that
taut blue-mottled skin –
mustn’t it? some
kind
of catalogue or
Dewey
decimal system or
something? The words,
the words, the wives;
even that time they made you pee
into a plastic jug
while I was still there
in the room. If I were to
throw
a net around your curdled brain
I
could catch your drift
and your dreams and
everything else in the world
but probably
I
wouldn’t understand
most of it anyhow.
So
what remains
to be seen
is how it all adds up
in the end
if that’s the way it is
some kind of simple
and irrefutable arithmetic
where no one knows the answer
but you and then only
at that moment
when it really doesn’t
matter anymore.
Alms
All
this I have offered:
three fingers on a cheek.
Words like
unguents. The
private room.
Bend
it: my will – you always have. Twist it
nearly to breaking. Plough it
deep into the dark. I will
allow it,
endlessly,
endlessly accommodate the dance, the
door, the back of your head - lovely
it is. None of this new,
none of this old.
These
things I have offered:
three jewels -
two copper coins -
the inside of my throat.
About the Author
During this past
year, Ms. Triedman has been named finalist for the 2007 Philbrick
Poetry Award, finalist for the James
Jones First Novel Fellowship, and winner of the
“Poorly Lit” © 2008 by Kim Triedman
“Whitney Place, Alzheimer’s Unit,
Natick, MA, March 2008 ” © 2008 by Kim Triedman
“Alms” © 2008 by Kim Triedman
*All rights reserved by the author – no work may
be reprinted without the express consent of its author.