Kimberly Southwick-Thompson
Kimberly Ann Southwick-Thompson is the founder and editor in chief of Gigantic Sequins, a print literary arts journal. She is an Assistant Professor of English, specializing in Creative Writing Poetry at Jacksonville State University. Her full-length poetry collection, Orchid Alpha, is forthcoming from Trembling Pillow Press in 2021; it was a finalist over six times and a semi-finalist twice before getting picked up. Kimberly has been a featured reader at the Open Mouth Poetry Festival and Dogfish New Orleans Reading series. She graduated in May 2020 with her doctorate in English & Creative Writing at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, after successfully defending her dissertation "Aletheia: An original collection of poems and a play, with an essay exploring hybridity in works by contemporary American women poets via hybrid utterance." Her most recently published poetry chapbook is EFS & VEES from Hyacinth Girl Press, and her micro-chap LAST TO BET: THE NEAR SONNETS was published by Ghost City Press in Summer 2020. Kimberly received her MA in English from NYU & her BFA in Writing, Literature, & Publishing from Emerson College. She currently lives in Saks, Alabama, with her husband, Geoffrey Thompson, their daughter, Esmé, and their two dogs, Jasper and Nova. Find out more at kimberlyannsouthwick.com or by following her on twitter, via @kimannjosouth.
THE BANANA TREES WILL GROW BACK BUT ARE THEY STILL EACH THE SAME TREE?
everyone knows the phoenix, upon regeneration,
is the same phoenix, Fawkes is still Fawkes.
what if we keep renewing ourselves, handing down
ourselves generation to generation? every mother
wants a better life than hers for her children,
but what if we are recreating the silver of our lives
at the expense of gold— what if we plateau?
the kombucha starter feeds on sugar & time,
doubling itself. ram-girl, metal rat, are you
me done over, are you poet or painter—
carpenter, beekeeper, librarian? are you
summer’s golden eye, warmth of sky,
a spoonful of rice, quiet in the swing because
this is an elegy to who I was, not to who you
will never become. I want to tell you a cliché
& want it to be true. I want to tell you
you can be anything you want to be, but
we can’t even leave the house right now,
aren’t safe pulling apples
from baskets at the grocery store.
every year, the banana trees
regenerate, spit pink flowers
towards heaven, shedding
dead brown leaves winter killed.
every year, each child of
the future grows an extra finger
an additional toe & we will not
be able to keep up with naming
each new appendage,
we will start naming them
for the runaway stars, the ones hurtling
so fast
through the galaxy they don’t
keep their place in the interstellar
medium: Aurigae, Arietis, Columbae.
this little piggy flew far far away &
all the way home again. do we really
want something better for them? or
do we want the piggy to stay home
because nothing better is out there,
we are so selfish to say—so unselfish
to stay home these days— do we
want the piggy to come back
because there is nothing better,
nothing safer than here but not only
for the right now?
hello walls, hello cup, hello
hello. this is an elegy for growing up,
for the banana trees,
for the phoenix—how can it really
be the same after living as ash,
after so many times bursting
into glorious flame.
XENOBIOLOGISTS SYNTHESIZE THE FUTURE
years ago, what stopped me was bigger than this habitable
zone & these scientists, they study life but
an approach that focused not what’s on other planets
but what’s biologically possible & isn’t happening here.
cold fear is different than hot fear. cold fear is
dead fear, not a stop sign but a wall. warm fear watches her
eat lunch when pieces of grapefruit are a little bigger than last time.
future me wears a mask to the bank. future me
goes home like she knows where home is, unafraid.
home is where the baby is, they say & they’re not wrong.
I hoist her to my hip. we are home. her life, its
journey just began & the world couldn’t be less
kind, the pollen couldn’t be thicker--hyperbole, sure, but not
lies. this isn’t the world she was conceived in. it never is, but--
mama, she’ll ask me one day, do you love
nature? & I’ll say yes dear, I love nature, but these
organisms you can’t see that get under your skin & exhale garbage,
prodding bumps to calculate patterns on your arms, these
question marks that litter our yard & fill up
room after room with their buzzing, these I don’t love.
someday, I won’t have this feeling of how can I possibly regret
this, I mean I don’t; how could I be so selfish will vaporize. in so many parallel
universes we are happy & the air is clean & healthy to breathe & the
variables, they say, are infinite so when I close my eyes, I imagine us there--
wherein we are so happy & made of light & have pearls or flowers for eyes.