Poems by Kimberly Gibson-Tran
James – 6/29/1944
————————-for Joe and Jay
The lines of this shaven jaw are so like the grandson’s
who took me to prom. I notice from Joe’s Veterans
Day post—three generations of names begin the same way:
James, Joseph, and my date Jay. We stayed out late
or left early. The only thing I remember fussing over
was the dress, sparkling beads in sky blue tulle. I wore
silver shoes Jay had me take off when we danced.
It spared my feet and made our heights less different.
A playful tilt of his head echoed the bent of his grandad’s
Army cap. James’ eyes in that posted portrait are sad.
Through the sepia his aviation wings shine metallic.
In Jay’s black Acura we were headbanging to Metallica,
his jet hair flopping back. How does the past feel alive?
Back then Jay and I wanted forward, warp or hyperdrive—
our friendship spent on the love and lore of Star Wars
and Star Trek. I coveted the shoulder pads, the uniforms,
creased pants. Jay liked rebel lasers, hooded layers. His lips
are James’ lips. We never kissed but I could admire the dip
of a fine curve, a perfect ear. Jay’s dad wrote that James
was killed in the air over Germany. It dawns on me that they
never met. Joe was conceived on leave, his father’s last
Christmas Eve. Jay and I gaze at stars, talk of blasters
and galaxies. There was a war on, but we weren’t worried.
There’s always a war. My tulle in moonlight is like a hoary
ghost or absent father-figure. In this night I’ve reimagined
I wonder if Jay was thinking about his grandfather Jim—
as close as he’d ever come to captain, manning those guns
on a metal falcon, 63 years to our side of the millennium.
Poem In Which I Promptly Fold My Laundry
I conquer a lifetime of biting my nails,
—–which produce elegant slivers of moons.
My mother or husband no longer turns pale
—–at the dull sound of ground keratin. My new
goal is to come up with a schedule for purging
—–the toilet bowl of its ghastly orange streaks,
invent a world in which I’ve tackled the urge
—–to shit. I’ll do it on company time, so to speak,
and pick up groceries after clocking off work.
—–I won’t have left the canvas bags, for the planet,
crumpled at the garage door. In fact, the clerk
—–admires me, rings me up in adoration. I plan it
so my gas tank is never less than quarter-full.
—–That way, I don’t live in a world in which
I panic-call my husband in traffic. Folded
—–clothes show I’ve grown, smoothed the hitch
in my giddyap, quit drafting poems at dawn.
—–Celestial, I sponge Dawn in my coffee cup
so it doesn’t build a crust. I get down
—–with adulting. I have stopped fucking up.
Kimberly Gibson-Tran holds two degrees in linguistics. She’s written critically about apprompted poems with “Lines by Someone Else” and has recent creative writing appearing or forthcoming in Rust & Moth, Baltimore Review, Passages North, Porter House Review, Third Coast, Reed Magazine, and elsewhere. She lives in Princeton, Texas, and is submitting her first poetry manuscript—The Voyagers.
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