Poetry
Listening for Paradise Amy King
Signature apprentice tastes and sweats backwards glances with numbing teeth inside her head for indigo raising night behind midlife guises, such that we see prisons of persons necessary. Particles of a usual dawn or factory smog descend upon the morning's neutral angels humming thrown voices. They remark solely on the weather or condition of this coffee. Unless a hand whispers through our pens and we begin to document the buried tales of our patient pennies fluttering from heaven.
Amy King received an M.F.A. from Brooklyn College. Her ebook, The Citizen's Dilemma can be found on the Duration Press site. Her chapbook, The People Instruments, is available from Pavement Saw Press. Most recently, her work appeared in Shampoo Poetry 16, can we have our ball back? 16, and Spork Magazine.
michael Marikim Kitchen
my seven year old eats silence like a bowl of cornflakes crowding the breakfast table with a crackling noise that licks the ears of his two brothers and a sister who wish this particular morning he'd not been born, or if so, then born with a silver spoon shoved down his throat. Happily ignoring their lack of perfect sleep he crows "mama? I quit cussin'!" a confession which shoves hypnotic eyes open causing yawns and spoonfuls of cereal to dangle and drip midair. "boy!" they protest in rare harmony, "shud up, you ain't never cussed" "uh huh!" he confesses, "didn' I mama, bud I quit!" hoping a quick return to the warm solitude of black coffee I mumble, "tha's good Michael, 'cuz mama don't like cussin'" "I know!" he smiles in triumph," tha's why I quit!" "hallelujah thank you jesus amen!" his sister sighs in mocking celebration of his sudden Saturday morning reform. "mama," she begs, "do you think tomorrow, maybe we could jus' have oatmeal?"
for times like these Marikim Kitchen
for faith shattered smaller than a mustard seed mountains are shakened at the chance that I may speak into the wind.
Marikim Kitchen works as the Academic Coordinator for the Upward Bound Program at UTA. She received her B.A. Degree in English Literature from Kansas State University and attended a summer writing workshop at Yale University to refine her craft. She is of Korean and African American descent and credits her love of the written and spoken word to her mother's need to understand "american people" and her subsequent discovery that this understanding was unleashed through the power of language. She is simply known by many as "marikim."
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