3 Poems

Kimberly Alidio
NO SOOTHING MOTHER

On either side of Pleasant Valley

Flat bone against a rock dick in a pocket

No-entry sign toppled over

Curled steel corkscrew-ridged

No man’s failing to pick up after himself

Pyramid of stones, corset of wire, horizon

A drained riverbed

Isn’t harmless here

A father from Korea wandering off from student apartments

 

Keep away from real places we spoil by inviting a crowd

Boys fight with sticks, small noise from a distance

A damn, a dam

Fishermen, single and in threes

Cloud areolas, smudged smoke

Meter told man who told me this light was best for picture taking

Letter from the cat to Philippians : “hang in there”

Ladies keep hips in line, speak of rape brilliantly

Front-ending the crash, a walk, a map under the street

Someone graffitied the word GRAFFITI on the side of the plant

 

A stench from the earth, a fish for a hum, still

Before destruction, a monument

 

ORNAMENTAL

Bellow the border

Charming hairless ornamentals

             Japanese knotwood : porcelain berry : multiflora rose

 

Prone to invasive non-natives in our mixed state

Firepaper water proof

 

Didn’t you notice us under the sail?

Are we the latest are we the last

 

Sprangletop path

 

Koi the Lady Bird Lake

Bamboo our Salt Lick BBQ

 

I touch rough peasant girl

            Mill pumping boys fork

            With mother’s sterling

 

I ruined her Miss America

Cozying with jasmine

 

Asian invasive

 

Remember Eden and

Your family’s private artesian spring

 

Let me shadow this wall

A new type of white

 

I can’t make sense of

The chicken smell below

CIRCLE OF ANTHROPOLOGISTS

A circle of anthropologists, one historian, a theater director

and a set of twins (mother and daughter)

 

A network of complaints, personal announcement

and YouTube videos

 

A table of soured soup ladlings, for all the times

I am a fucking hipster, I apologize

 

for Bollywood music blaring at the stop sign

in front of your barrio church

 

I spooned mercy on your enemies

Pardon my skinny jeans

 

 

Kimberly Alidio
Kimberly Alidio

Kimberly Alidio lives in Austin, teaches history, and dramaturges for the Generic Ensemble Company. Her poetry chapbook, Solitude Being Alien, is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press. Essays and poetry appear in several places, including American Quarterly, ESQUE, Everyday Genius, Fact-Simile, Lantern Review, Make/shift, and Social Text, and in the forthcoming Philippine Palimpsests: Essays for the 21st Century and Dismantle: A VONA Anthology. She is writing a historical monograph, "Colonial Cosmopolitanism." She received a University of Illinois Postdoctoral Fellowship in Asian American Studies, and a Naropa Summer Writing Program Zora Neale Hurston Scholarship.