A lightning strike
and the balance of injustice tilted
unjustly, millions of lives
hemmed into the pants of just a few.
A fog lifted then resumed, then lifted again,
as if he could simply sit back
and watch his girlfriend bleed
in an urgent care center.
Transferred by ambulance,
she learns her baby has gone ectopic–
best pray hard as her tube bursts,
and fever strikes,
believing God plays any part
in this. I’ve sense enough
to have been born a gay man,
but I have a daughter
and I come from a long line
of uteruses. The crusades
have not finished
for those they deem sinful,
as if separation of church
and state is just a dotted line.
The woman mourns a child
some would still have expected
her to carry, a clump of dead tissue,
until her body expelled it,
or she died of sepsis, such things,
as they are, God’s will.
On the TV in the lobby
as they wheel her outside,
a right-wing pundit point out
that mothers are having babies
with no money to raise them,
as if the same government
that held her in the palm of its hand
and watched her dilate,
now expected her
to do anything other than suffer.
Author: Mickie Kennedy
Mickie Kennedy is an American poet who resides in Baltimore County, Maryland with his family and two feuding cats. He enjoys British science fiction and the idea of long hikes in nature. His work has appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Artword Magazine, Conduit, Portland Review, Rockhurst Review, and Wisconsin Review. He earned an MFA from George Mason University.
bookmark_borderCobalt Tears
Blue tulips in April are mine.
I have claimed them all as my own.
I allow them to cleave the ground
you watch them grow from,
every act of agriculture
a wayward rebellion
beneath a forgiving sun.
I am at this moment the devil’s gift
at communion, the air you take
as you swallow bread and wine.
Divine is the art you attempt
with blades and vases, an army of colors,
when the only one that concerns me is
as blue as the parrot’s plumage.
The parrot suffers from insomnia and says,
The end is nigh. Unusual words, perhaps,
for an avian protagonist. Green is
the color of Christmas wrapping paper
carefully folded on the ends so that
what is square is covered in a closing
of triangular flats. Every toy for a boy
is a train and every toy for a girl is
a doll, except when it is not.
And when all else fails, like a plane
losing altitude, like a baker who knows
the very second to remove the loaves
from the oven, the difference in toys
does not matter, they are a testament
to something rooted in the past.
In your eyes, a wink of blue
and the spring leaves of my very own
flower come alive.
And I allow one more minute, a few seconds
too long, and like the thick skin
of a baguette over-baked, I think to myself
that over time you will grow solid
and unbreakable. All the while your petals
grow loose and fall to the ground.
This poem appeared in East by Northeast, September 2020.
bookmark_borderBad Dad
I wipe tiredness from my eyes.
It’s morning, another day survived.
And so begins the drip of last-night scoops
of coffee into a mug, World’s Greatest Dad.
I fail to measure up to that cup’s depth,
a half-assed bundle of Irish rage
and remembrance of children dancing gingerly
as I brood in my La-Z-Boy.
I exchange mementos of saved ticket stubs
and photos taken at the zoo in front
of the Gross Outpost in Africa
where birds pick ticks from rhinos and the kids
pose—daughter as tick remover, son
as tick removee—for a warm, toaster
strudel, strawberry with cream-cheese icing
squeezed from a plastic pouch. This is
the sedimentary layer of my family
for which no fossil record exists—
just remnants from a psychiatrist
office, the strength of Prozac and Adderall
noted on the clipboard of someone
more attuned to the ebb and flow
of family dynamics, one’s mouth
a bucket in the act of fill and pour,
I’m a feather on the end of a cap of a man
halfway between dawn and dusk, a time
for white-tailed deer and auto insurance
deductibles. A fur-patch adorns my cracked bumper.
I loved my mother, but did not like her.
This is the legacy my children pull
from the sand and wash at the water’s edge:
A scallop shell nudging its way from ivory
to orange, and its edge, sharp and varied,
biting into the soft fat of a child’s fingers.
This poem appeared in East by Northeast, September 2020.
bookmark_borderAmerican Obsessive
My best friend’s life has been stripped to its essence. His living room is devoid of brash luxuries: no couches, no chairs. Twenty-eight years later, he’s still waiting for the right ones. His only photos are JPEGs on a computer. He likes to keep the walls pristine, freshly-painted Sherwin Williams Steamed Milk White every three years. I just don’t have the heart to sully such a perfect wall with nails.
Everything in his pantry bears the date of purchase in Sharpie. He’s given up cable TV for YouTube, mostly grocery hauls, middle aged women hoisting bags of frozen mango. He’s convinced the hardwood floors are creaking differently, so he asks me to walk back and forth as he listens.
He keeps the door shut to a third bedroom. Twice he’s shown me what he considers a failing—tall shelves containing more than four-hundred phones. Asimitel, Century, Crosley, Disney, Kingston, Regal, Strowger, Viking. Rotary phones, push-button phones, princess phones, a candlestick phone, a big button landline, a sleek slimline, a PacMan phone, a football phone, a Hot Lips landline.
He stands in the middle of the room. In the corner, four bins run length-wise, resembling a blue sarcophagus. His hand rests on a black Western Electric called the screamer, but there is no screaming. It’s quiet, this room filled with hundreds of phones. No voices other than our own. No rings, buzzes, rattles, clatters, hums.
My friend picks up the red handset of an Asimitel emergency phone and presses it to his cheek. There is no emergency. He sets the receiver back down. The sound of plastic settling into plastic, then nothing, then nothing all over again.
An earlier version of this poem appeared in East by Northeast, September 2020.
bookmark_borderGrowing Wings
Pink wet robin, a baby perched
on the end of a shoe,
plucked right back into the nest,
to be rejected if the oils on my hand aren’t too human.
The alchemy of milk into caramel,
a shifting of weight on linoleum.
When the power finally cuts off
there’s a triangle of steak, a folded slice of bread, and beer.
Wings sit in the back of geometry class.
Mother of pearl at this angle, bending at the knee,
she makes the sign of the agnostic.
HVAC repairmen fashion sheet metal into tear ducts.
A line of migratory birds registering flight paths with the FAA.
This poem appeared in GRIFFEL, June 2020.
bookmark_borderThe Queen’s Bonfire
Damn the will. The day’s blotter
has given up the dead:
a girl’s name and alleged act of treason.
A wooden chair for her to sit,
should her location be revealed.
The plume, a plane, a vintner’s glass,
the sprocket in a mechanic’s bag of tricks.
I’d rather the search be
for something regal than the alternative,
a girl in a faded blue dress and a stitch
of remorse along the hem. Her simple act
of defiance was a raised glass and a toast
to simpler times, when a girl could grow into woman,
not fuel for a queen’s amusement, a fire left
to smolder in an open field, the many places
a royal sword can linger over the body
until what passes for allegiance
becomes severed and alone.
A sedan with stolen plates circles
the castle as a guard smiles and turns away.
He knows these are uncertain times.
An Uber or an assassin, either way no reward
in the status quo. Better to keep quiet
as a family tree splinters and catches fire.
The queen is the town’s fodder. Tonight, she
crackles and burns.
This poem appeared in Passengers Journal, July 2020.
bookmark_borderFalling Outside the Body
Each blade of grass pressed by the bottom of my feet, I walk in open opposition to those seated at the wedding where I should have been your groom. I had learned to speak American through a series of tapes that arrived in the mail, being out of place more a mood than the actual spot where I buried my face into a pillow.
You look at me the way women look at the rib cages of Victorian corset wearers, holding the strings in their mouths while tightening the straps. Cordial cherries I bought at the drug store and administered to those I disdain. A drawer of zip ties and rubber bands. The way Sarajevo means something to those with a past and a passport.
A cat with a factory of purrs, and I will write the pen from the table and across the linoleum. The monotony of friendship, mathematical imprecision at the shoulders my head tucks into, a story of revolution where no hero, no David or Goliath. The haves and have nots both own flat screen TVs, microwaves, bicycles with the hand shake of handle bars, and froyo on almost every corner.
Every 50 years, a family tree re-written, two people fall into the pre-divorced state of marriage, followed by children. Desire on every billboard, commercial, college application. We are being marketed a version of ourselves: improved, enhanced, saddled with one more vacation getaway, a car more indulgent than the last. Was this where I lost you?
Life has starved the emotional connections on the vine so that social media posts trigger feelings. The Christmas commercial for a grocery chain prompts tears as I realize what a dead grandparent truly means. The time we stood on your apartment balcony and caught snowflakes on our tongues.
The boy at middle school whose mother packaged his sandwich in carefully folded wax paper, he experienced just a bit more love than the boy with the dollar bill for a hot lunch. Doubt is the real currency of capitalism. What if my future kids think I don’t love them because I didn’t buy them Lunchables? What if my future wife realizes all that’s stopping her from sleeping with other men is whether I bought the best patio set?
The landscape architect says he can tell your husband loves his family before steering him to the deluxe package, with swimming pool and white picket fence: vinyl, maintenance free, years of family parties before the inevitable divorce. My mind is a pocket cactus I take out and set on the window sill in the kitchen.
During a recent lunch with a co-worker, I learned she was on marriage number four. I loved them all, she said. There’s just a sort of magic that takes place in the first three years that she can only catch in a new one, a new ring, proposal, honeymoon, getting to know someone all over again for the not first time.
Even the waiters are singing along to the Christmas song amidst the clink of dishes and glasses filled and refilled. Not to trouble you taps the outside of my car window, but it’s awfully cold, and how much alive do I want to feel on my ride home?
A $5 bill I keep in the center console for such occasions. The truth in giving isn’t the size so much as the convenience, how paper currency folded in half and slipped like Cold War secrets takes me back. The time I fed scraps to the stray dog, and he came back with friends, so you called animal control. For their own good.
The amount of trouble caring takes depends on the make of the car and the condition of the roads. Under my seat, the ashes of a favorite uncle sealed in a cardboard box, waiting for just the right time I’m not sure will ever come.
At the crossroads of empty gestures, I wonder if tipping the barista is a way of asserting my humanity. I sit in front of my laptop, my finger hovering over the track pad uncertain whether to accept your friend request. I wonder why you are circling back to me: perhaps an inventory of paths not taken, perhaps an easier way to measure the years and ultimately keep score?
This poem appeared in The Write Launch, July 2020.
bookmark_borderSmall Talk
We are projections on a sheet in the yard,
suspicious spools of film liberated from metal cans.
When there is nothing left to play, the children retreat
to flashlight tag, and the women refresh their wine.
The men huddle in the darkness.
Someone is talking about the circus,
and a boy on stilts who used to shout insults at the crowd.
Your mama’s so short, she needs a ladder to pick up a dime.
The landscape is a mishmash of competing conversations
against a backdrop of cricket chirps.
A chalk-spot of moon hovers overhead.
The men join the women, and the story of how each couple met
becomes fodder for laughs and intrigue.
The new couple who just moved in say they met at the gym
in a nearby state—her just out of college.
What he doesn’t say is that he worked there
and had signed her up with her then husband—
a complimentary personal training session
that ended badly or well, depending on your perspective.
Desire is a stack of chips pushed into the middle of the poker table, all in.
Another one, he interjects. Your mama’s so short, she poses for trophies.
The men laugh. The women look at each other and smile.
The origin story was rehearsed, and tomorrow’s verdict
will be that it was fine. Such stories carry a short middle and end,
deliberate answers for deliberate actions.
A child emerges with a frog in her hand.
Can we keep it? she asks. Absolutely not, her mother says.
Polite laughter, then the girl runs back to the other children.
We have reached a crossroads, nay, a threshold.
Someone has walked into the wind chimes near the back door:
hollow bamboo and aluminum with no cadence.
I think someone has had too much to drink, someone says,
and more laughter.
The new couple stand as one shadow, and she says
it’s time to go, something about stopping at the dry cleaners
on the way to work in the morning.
The soundtrack in her head plays, You’re a fraud.
She smiles. You matter. You’re a good man, she says,
then switches over to another station.
This poem appeared in The Write Launch, July 2020.
bookmark_borderBig Score on a Little Porch
A couple of women in hospital scrubs
steal packages on porches. When
the homeowner checks the footage
he finds the culprit is unfindable,
essentially anyone—essential or not.
They parked far enough away so not
even sure of the car or whether they
walked a few houses down where they
might live. They are everyone and
no one. The video is uploaded and shared
online with neighbors. Very few seem
to care. The police file an incident report
over the phone. He offers the video
to an Amazon customer service rep
who says no need, she’s already sent
out a replacement. These things just
happen, she says. The price of theft
and damage already calculated in,
less lately because most people are
home but the delivery people don’t
ring the doorbell so there’s always
the chance what happened here will
happen again. Somewhere these women
are opening the box after their big score:
a bottle of anti-itch foot spray
and a 5-pound bag of Epsom salt.
This poem appeared in The Write Launch, July 2020.
bookmark_borderJust Like Your Mother
Three years ago, before the separation,
hate-spattered yellow, Sherwin Williams,
the boundary of our bodies growing jagged,
then dashed, to suggest disputed territory.
I imagine you sleeping with the same intensity
of a squinting cat. You are not asleep,
yet things go more literally, smoothly,
as when the fret at the foot of the floor grieves openly,
the way morphine spiggles out the door and down the stairs.
Look what you made me do: a snake-eye roll of the zodiac.
This poem appeared in Midway Journal, 2020.