The Intolerable Nature of Yearning

And now something from our sponsors... So, This is a Katie Kidder original. It was first published in Contrary Magazine in the fall of 2007 and is now here for your reading pleasure.

The Intolerable Nature of Yearning

I have been searching for you
as the mornings and the evenings scroll by in a mad collage of letters that want
to be your name.

I have looked in the phone book
and in Japanese. I found you thinly veiled in Freud's Illusion
just to lose you down a page of long division.
I watched my goldfish mouth you out a thousand times in spheres
that ascended slowly to the surface and then popped.
I have seen your name almost complete itself
in my husband's dirty socks.
I nearly licked you off
a whiskey label-- if I could swallow what you are
I would.

My friend, my friend who feels prettier
in her skull's long grin,
accused your terms of catching me like a fish
bone in the throat.

She laughed at me, smoked and puffed,
"A man who writes knows too much."*


*From Anne Sexton's "The Black Art"

Little Miss Electra

This is the first poem I ever had published in respected journal. Kind of clunky in some parts now that I look back on it, but I think it's still a worthwhile read.

Little Miss Electra
by Katie Kidder

I like old guys, because they are gray where I am dyed.
Old men amusing me with motown Otis after hours
supposing I don't know that with the lights down and our faces numb from a cheap shiraz,
I look like that little Miss Rah-Rah they never got to palm
in the green glow of their daddies' dashboards.

I like old guys, because they have dyed where I will gray.
Old men with thighs that forgot to age, bellies that remembered,
and hindsight like the long impregnable stare of a fighter pilot.
They have seen wars, read books about wars,
waged little private wars of their own
back when I was still a part of my father's fight.

I like old guys because they will lose the gray before I dye.
Old men with crows' feet around the eyes and tobacco in their sighs
they are not the dad I knew when I was five.
Not that one with the farmer's tan and the cocaine fog,
and not the one when I was twenty-three, too drunk to know the difference
between his girlfriend's name and mine.

I like old guys because they do not care about the gray.
Old men as flawless as my father was when I was twelve and he was sober,
when we discussed our dreams over stewed meat and moon pies.
What would Jung say? What would Freud think?
Perfect, beautiful old men who know who I'm looking for,
but still, they let me look.

Originally published at the Exquisite Corpse

Commitment

What better way to follow up a sweet love poem post than with a scathing indictment on commitment. (Which, happily, is not indicative of my current state of affairs.) This poem was written some years ago and was published originally in the Summer/Fall 2005 issue of So to Speak.

Happy reading.

Commitment

by Katie Kidder

I am home late from work again today.

The doorknob is greasy and unlocked.
All of the lights are on,
even the one over the oven that I never use.
Somewhere, water is running.

You are still here.

What have you been doing with my dog?
She’s running in circles.
There’s red velvet cake on her nose—
I was saving that cake for Saturday.

I can hear you upstairs.

You are either in my bed or on my computer.
“Hardcore.com isn’t what it looks like, honey.
I don’t know why Horny Housewives is highlighted.
I was looking at people with their eyes torn out ‘n stuff.”

You seem glad that I do not care either way.

Tonight while you are downstairs,
getting high, watching Return of the Jedi,
clipping your toenails on the coffee table,
opting not to bathe,

I will not ask you to leave.

I will crawl into the closet like a child,
where it is quiet and black
and envy the people on the Internet
with their eyes torn out.

Muse

Muse Katie Kidder

Oh, it's so bad
to get stuck with a muse you don't want.
Why couldn't I have been assigned Bobby Frost's muse,
or someone with something like grace?

Mine belches and scratches her ass in the hall.
She has the sickly sweet smell of children
and stale Nilla Wafers, as though she was sprung
from the foam of the sofa.

She grabs at my smokes during the two-point conversion,
and she swims in my wine like a gnat.
I trip over her, by the bed, reading Plath on the floor
at six in the morning when I get up for tea.

My muse is nothing like me.
She waxes perverse in the thighs of thin blondes
when we've a perfectly good blonde at home.
And that bitch burns my old lovers' letters
and makes up her face with the ashes.

Kissing my muse, I imagine,
is like swallowing a mouthful of honey and rust,
and twisting your legs in her legs in the cold comfort of dark
is like spooning, in the sea, on the rag, with a shark.

My muse works with the mercy of bullets, falling.

read about the author © 2004 Contrary Magazine

Dreaming in Blue Linens

This, like most poems, was a long time in the making. I originally wrote it as an undergrad at LSU. At the time it was entitled The Color of Longing. Well, many moons and many, many drafts later it found its final resting place in the 2005 issue of Ellipsis. Enjoy!


Dreaming in Blue Linens

I shouldn’t
because you’re much too young.
You’d come too quick
and leave too soon.

Still…
You push me up
against the bedroom wall,
one hand up my skirt,
pawing at my body
like climbing a breaking ladder—
clinging, frantic.

Buttons pop off
like bunk fireworks, as the smell
of your hair and breath fills me. We stumble, laughing,
almost fucking
but bound at the ankles
by our underwear.

Until our laughter becomes
sighing, moaning, those gentle
but forgettable declarations
of desire, love maybe, something dirty?

In the dark I stutter the name,
(and it sounds nearly like crying for help)
of a god I won’t consider in the light.

Then it’s done
and life is ordinary again.
I look lonely
past the miles of blue,
miles and miles of pale,
blue empty sheets.
I light a smoke and think
Baby, you should have been here.
You were great.