Kathryn Kimball has a BA in English and French, an MFA in Poetry and Poetry in Translation, and a Ph.D. in English Literature. From 1991-2007, she taught writing and nineteenth-century British and American literature as an adjunct professor. Her translations and poems have appeared in Transference, Plume, The Galway Review, and others. Her chapbook Crossings will appear in September 2021 (Finishing Line Press). A practitioner of yoga for twenty-five years, mother of six, she and her husband live in New York City.

Tail End of Things

Here’s a question about
the chicken and the egg,
not which came first,
but the stupefying how of it.

How can a chicken
pecking away at drab seeds
table dregs
dull peelings
the tail end of things—

how can a hen out of kitchen muck
create a golden sun
a nugget of delight
a yellow more sustaining
than a miser’s hoard,

then hide it away in a treasure box
of tinted ivory
most delicate?

Well might I ask—
I, who peck drearily away
at old habits
lazy failures
leftovers
from years ago

and have no morning miracle
to show.

Truth be told

I will never admit it.
No, never.
I’ll think about it perhaps,
but the truth will never out.

It’s buried, bricked up, sealed off.
Wild horses couldn’t drag it out;
it’s way down.
Under a continent by now.

I will never ever admit it.
No, never.

Unless it just slips out
in a poem.

If she hadn’t been

If she hadn’t been
poor, a farmer’s daughter
turned orphan at fourteen

married at sixteen
in her best brown dress
in the back of a pick-up

she could have been

a snuff-dipping detective
solving grisly murders
at the Bell St. Hotel

a peanut-eating mill owner
paying bonuses for snappy tunes
turned to the rhythm of the looms

a guitar-toting blues singer
blowing away her listeners
in black patent pumps

a chain-smoking poet, high on Krispy Kremes
writing true confessions
on the back of coffee-ringed envelopes

a First Baptist organist in a flowered dress
with faux-pearl ear bobs and an extra “u”
for Scrabble-cheats hidden in her bra

that is, if she hadn’t been
poor, orphaned, married
in the back of a pick-up

if she hadn’t been
I wouldn’t be.
As it was, she was grandma.