Category: Keetje Kuipers

by Keetje Kuipers

My earliest memory is someone else’s.

A few years later, I eat all the yellow

flowers off the clover, the first of 1000

small secrets I’ll forget. The little boys

are my neighbors and I spend each

afternoon making us a home. Soon

my legs grow so long they are other

than myself. More parts follow,

scaffolding becomes necessary.

The marching band plays songs I know

by heart; I mean that I memorize all

the words. Each time I get on a plane,

I’m someone new, until I’m so good

I don’t need to fly to transform.

When my parents are suddenly

more tired than they’ve ever been,

I take over the farm, the spoonfeeding.

One minute I’m becoming

myself, the next I’m forgetting how.

from The Keys to the JailFind it in the library

Copyright © BOA Editions, Ltd 2014
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc.
on behalf of BOA Editions LTD.

by Keetje Kuipers

They say the modern condition is one

of isolation, and if I’m anything,

I’m modern. That must be why missing

you feels so inauthentic. Even in

the pastel glow of a Diebenkorn,

I can’t forget that I belong alone.

Unlike the homeless couple, curled

together under a yellow blanket

in the doorway of the Chinese bakery

each night, I hate the intimacy we share.

But if I can imagine these solitary

pictures removed from their frames

and pressed together in a kind of awkward

kiss, and if the photograph of a woman

naked on a park bench were to reveal

the figure perched beside her, a hand

resting on her breast just above

that scuttling heart, then I can say this:

Come home. Help me find a way.

from The Keys to the JailFind it in the library

Copyright © BOA Editions, Ltd 2014
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc.
on behalf of BOA Editions LTD.

by Keetje Kuipers

The weather came in just as I left town, a farewell show

over the hood of the car. There has to be a way

to put the beauty inside, to carry it along: snow flurries

freckling my belly, cedar fence post ribs

expanding with each breath. But you want to know

what to do with the dead cow we saw in the winter pasture,

where to hide the old mill pouring her bitter steam—

All those landmarks that hold a body under, pin it down,

belong in narrow little books with loose spines

where folded ferns fall out moth-riddled,

worm-worn pages pinpricked through with light.

I couldn’t be the crutch of cloudless days against

your dog-eared sadnesses. But maybe I was wrong

to think I understood despair’s whittling hand any better

than you did, now walking among all that beauty I left behind.

from The Keys to the JailFind it in the library

Copyright © BOA Editions, Ltd 2014
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc.
on behalf of BOA Editions LTD.

by Keetje Kuipers

Twilight might be called

    a gray scarf pulled over your lover’s eyes.

And the bicyclist’s body

    cutting swiftly through it

is a beautifully composed semaphore,

    like the shape meaning makes

in a set of signal lights

    at the end of a darkening runway:

two orange sticks crossed, then waving,

    motioning inward.

I should be telling you about fireflies,

    the containment of light, how we work

to bring it closer to us, into our bodies,

    into a glass jar with a screw-on lid

where it can shine and reverberate

    in the ever-thinning air. Instead

I think of my fifth summer,

    the day I lost one shoe

over the side of a sailboat,

    its sinking away from me

into the untreadable dark.

    The soul is composed

of infinite planets sucked into black holes

    and what comes out the other side—

light or its golden shadow—is each our own.

    Like those fishing boats

that ride out to the world’s curve each evening,

    their string of bobbing lamps

nothing more than an infirm constellation

    pinned to your child’s ceiling.

from Beautiful in the MouthFind it in the library

Copyright © BOA Editions, Ltd 2010
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc.
on behalf of BOA Editions LTD.

by Keetje Kuipers

It’s summer. Eighty-five degrees.

We’ve spent all day on a blanket

in the high grass of an abandoned

cemetery. The backs of my thighs

are sunburned and tomorrow I’ll shiver

as the heat pours out of my skin.

Earlier, when I climbed onto you

for the second time, I could see

a row of headstones through the trees.

And when I rocked over you

their round and rain-worn scalps

rose into my line of sight until

I could imagine the bodies beneath them

propped up, watching us make love.

Each one of their wide skulls silently

smiled as if remembering something

sweet and fleeting, and not wanting

to tell me so. I needed to explain to them then

that my body has been a bell

that’s waited years to be rung by you.

That the cartilage grinding in my hip sockets

when I move against you makes a dust

finer than the finest semolina flour

and I pay it out from my body willingly.

That finally coming to love you

has been a hard-earned pleasure,

so that every time you enter me

I want to cry out, Bury me,

bury me. Put me in the ground.

from Beautiful in the MouthFind it in the library

Copyright © BOA Editions, Ltd 2010
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc.
on behalf of BOA Editions LTD.

by Keetje Kuipers

If I have any romantic notions left,

please let me abandon them here

on the dashboard of your Subaru

beside this container of gas station

potato salad and bottle of sunscreen.

Otherwise, my heart is a sugar packet

waiting to be shaken open by some

other man’s hand. Let there be another town

after this one, a town with an improbable Western

name—Wisdom, Last Chance—where we can get

a room and a six-pack, where the fireworks

end early, say nine o’clock, before it’s really

gotten dark enough to see them because

everyone has to work in the morning.

I’m not asking for love anymore.

I don’t care if I never see a sailboat again.

from Beautiful in the MouthFind it in the library

Copyright © BOA Editions, Ltd 2010
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc.
on behalf of BOA Editions LTD.