Stacy Kidd

Not everyone I love talks to me

It’s true you could have
grown the skies
unprotected from harm
an arm too loose
under a window’s sheet
glass or the color
too clear a nest
to press into a book.

The shame of an end— Come home.
Head home.

Skies stranger than
what childhoods keep us
crooked I said
like anything that can learn
I see you a long time
or I said or I said.

A house like a home when

Engines break
better or
wear better
or not left to their own
brokens-down

I never want to carry that again—

felled
trees
where trees
could not
exact sound & I wouldn’t

give it up

Epidemic of Christmastime Event

How can anything from the aughts survive into the teens? Impossibly,
poems become experiences not insignificant but not signifying.

There are necessary ways of moving through streets.
Even if later, I become a sorrow— spare still water where I sometimes walk,

I have done such unimpressive things and wronged people and clapped
into mundane epiphanies and thought once

once wasn’t singular even tho it isn’t singular. See.

Georgic

At some point, breakfast comes.

Friends swim in a lake.
Nothing unseemly rises.

You say you are grateful.
People point to an average

particular—trees

stubborn in water, weeds
of a water.

Geese cross the sidewalks and bridges.
One could say the geese.

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Stacy Kidd is the author of two chapbooks: A man in a boat in the summer (Beard of Bees Press) and About Birds (Dancing Girl Press). Her work has appeared in journals including Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, Interim, and Phoebe, among others. She lives and writes in Oklahoma.