[with poems by Kimberly O’Connor]
We walk out of the pines and hear it, a throaty chuff and grumble from somewhere across the corn field. A plume of dust and chaff is one clue but the clincher is the field’s gnawed border twelve rows wide, a swath of brittle stalks and husks eaten and spat out. And a scatter of yellow kernels in the weeds.
After we cross the road our trail re-enters the woods but still parallels the field. The combine is laboring well out of sight but its growling swells and fades. Linda and I hike this particular bit of Mountains-to-Sea trail every week and we’ve been wondering why these acres have been standing so long unharvested. Great day for an answer, this Wednesday before Thanksgiving – school’s out! – and the grandkids with us. Hardwoods now. In the leafless shadows we can smell corn dust even when we can’t see the field through the undergrowth. Saul hangs back to talk philosophy and politics with Linda while Amelia skips ahead and dares me to jump over every rock and root.
At our turning-back-to-the-car point, the trail branches north to Grassy Creek and south into the corn field. Machinery noise has receded; I want to see the carnage. We all walk up the red clay bank. Most of the stalks are now stubble but a few have been pushed over, unconsumed. I wander a few rows and pick up dry ears to show Saul and Amelia. Moldy toward the silks, but mostly each ear is clean hard kernels clinging to cob. I put a few nuggets in my pocket. Saul keeps two unshucked ears to carry home for evidence.
Back at the road crossing the uproar reaches its crescendo. We see the top of the cab as it approaches, pulling rows of stalks into its jutting incisors, and then it finishes its row and roars past us. A man and his son sit high in the glassed-in booth! They wave back to us and we watch for a few more minutes as more of the field is mown down.
When we turn back into the woods, Amelia says, “I’m sure glad they weren’t mad at us for taking some of their corn.” Small miracles – and another is that on today’s hike we heard nary a complaint from the kids even when I confessed I’d forgotten to bring the snacks.
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Old Dominion
Remove arteries,
veins, and clotted blood
around heart
was the start of a recipe
for chicken pie in
a 1920’s cookbook
I found and read in the house
of friends we were staying with
in Charlottesville. It was
an heirloom. Their whole house
was antique, old fashioned:
mason jars, strawberries
resting in colanders, milk
in a white porcelain pitcher.
Worn embroidered linen dishcloths.
She canned. He cut wood
for fires in winter but
this was summer. The air
almost tropical, unbreathable.
Azaleas. Wisteria. Roses.
When I breathed in, it hurt.
The house hurt me and
I didn’t know why.
Everything was white.
Clotted blood around heart –
I wanted that cookbook.
I almost stole it. I was
a terrible houseguest. I wanted
to go home. I cried beside
the clawfoot bathtub
throughout the afternoon.
I wanted to go home and
I wanted to own that house.
Kimberly O’Connor
from White Lung, Saturnalia Books, Ardmore PA, © 2021
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Kimberly O’Connor’s poetry is the surgeon’s dispassionate blade. Lie straight and still and watch the blood well up. Yes there will be pain, yes invasion, yes you are vulnerable, but what is cut from you may offer your best chance to live.
Kimberly O’Connor’s poetry is the surgeon’s passion and point of compassion. Yes there is pain in our world, both of us know it, both feel it, both of us have at times caused the pain. But here is our best chance for hope, for a world where we dig out the pain, find its roots, put it in a place where we can all see it for what it is. Maybe it won’t have to hurt us forever.
In White Lung, Kimberly explores every painful vein and clot of her Southern heritage and upbringing. She doesn’t flinch, although she cries and so do we, her readers. Several of her poems share the same title, The History of My Silence, which proclaims one of the major themes of the book and can be extended to the silence of not just one individual but of our society and culture: by extension, the silence of our history. Not only are the individual poems tense with emotion and meaning, but the poems communicate with each other to weave a personal story, and interconnect to bring their painful, hopeful, glorious epiphanies into masterful wholeness.
The North Carolina Poetry Society awards its annual Brockman-Campbell Award to the best volume published by a North Carolina writer in the preceding year. Kimberly O’Connor and White Lung are the winner for 2022. Kimberly is a NC native who lives in Golden, Colorado and has over 20 years of experience teaching and working with writers ages eight to adult. This is her first book.
[More information about the Brockman-Campbell Award, White Lung, and another poem by Kimberly O’Connor, available here: ]
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Portrait of a Lady
her father an electrician her mother
a hairdresser (it’s not that simple)
(you want her to be nice
and quiet) she’s a girl reading
in her tiny bedroom in the trailer
she does not say a word
you don’t want to read the word
n_____ but there it is her mother
says it her father says it the trailer
echoes with its two-syllable
thud & poison you can read
(here) where she wrote it in her diary a nice
(straight white) girl straight hair straight A’s nice
and quiet (like you want) says not a word
sits in the beauty shop reading
spinning a chair while her mother
cuts hair (she imagines she is special)
they drive the dirt road to the trailer
they move out of the trailer
build a house (big wood nice)
when her father wins a sweepstakes
they look at the letter repeating the words
over and over (it’s true) her mother
gives her the letter to read
there it is in red
(one hundred thousand dollars) the trailer
becomes a memory her mother
moves the shop to the new nice
spare room the ladies get shampoo & styles words
hum white nose white ladies scissors
swish you can see it (it’s simple)
a whit girl grows up in the South its red
& pink mimosas dripping scent the words
they say there taking root trailing
tendrils in even nice
girls’ minds (everyone says them even mothers)
Kimberly O’Connor
from White Lung, Saturnalia Books, Ardmore PA, © 2021
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Untitled (By the End)
By the end, we won’t remember what
happened when. We’ll remember hardly
any of it. The only thing that makes it
bearable is all the blossoming. The trees
turn white, then green. What unfolds
for me unfolds secondhandedly.
While they’re injecting the midazolam,
I am watching little girls in black
leotards play tag. Or it takes longer
than I think and we are already driving
home for dinner. But let’s go back
to before that. There was a murder.
It was violent. It was not an accident.
A young woman died and a young man
went to prison. Elsewhere, unrelated,
I want to be a poet. I fall in love with
someone. He becomes a lawyer.
We become a mother and a father.
We move to Denver. My husband meets
the young man in prison. He’s no longer
young. He becomes a kind of friend.
Of course this takes years. I learn things
like in supermax, the inmates are required
by law to have access to one hour
of sunlight per day. On death row,
the light though a skylight counts.
The men can’t touch their families
or each other. The day before their
executions, their mothers cannot hug
their sons good-bye. No one cares about this.
Why should they? Their victims’ parents
didn’t get to hug their children before—
yes. That is correct. So what’s wrong
with me? My husband sends his client books.
Should I say his name? He likes
vampire books. Mysteries. Thrillers.
When my husband calls him with the news
that the last appeal has been denied,
Clayton says Have a good weekend
when they hang up the phone. My husband
flies to Oklahoma City. I wait.
Amelia’s dance class is in a church.
I sit in the sanctuary and imagine
I am holding Clayton’s hand.
I am ridiculous. But my hand feels
warm for a minute. My husband calls
and he is weeping. Or he is furious.
He’s not dead yet, he says.
They kicked us out. They closed
the curtain and they made us leave.
It’s the end of April; everything’s in bloom.
It snows, then the sun comes back.
By summer, we should feel better.
By autumn, we might forget.
Our garden grows. We harvest. I walk
through the alley carrying vegetables.
When I get home and dump out the cucumbers,
I’m filled suddenly with joy. I pirouette
around the kitchen and imagine Clayton
is dancing with me, his spirit, anyway.
I think he is. I wish for it. I imagine
his victim’s mother wishing deeply
for my death, and I don’t blame her for it.
Kimberly O’Connor
from White Lung, Saturnalia Books, Ardmore PA, © 2021
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V E R S E ❦ I M A G E 