Kimberly White
The Little Girl Who Knows How to Spell Turquoise
There is no silent beauty in her soul, it spills out loud. Beauty of sidewalk chalk in Easter egg colors. Beauty of dandelions defying concrete, puff spores floating without need for breeze. Beauty of rust patterns on dented metal fence bars and mutilated cars which grow in the gardens of her neighborhood. Beauty in the hopscotch dance of her ten-year-old feet as she spells t-u-r-q-u-o-i-s-e with the dexterity of a forest sprite reborn on city streets complicated by competing thugs and decaying shades of stone and paint and yes, turquoise, where gunshot patterns bisect the hot air and bloodred burns into her sleep if there is any sleep in a hypervigilant world tempered by books and TV with stories of worlds which can’t be true and if they are, they will never touch her but it’s okay, they’re not really true, truth like that can’t live on her streets. The rough map of her street bleeds color shifts of black asphalt cracked into darker patch-veins betraying the dark heart of ground conquered by underground, shifts of blues filtered through dirty bricks and gray sidewalks and neon sparks and lit cigarettes and blinded stars until it is no longer blue but still blue, shifts to what was once green to what is now dead to that which resurrects in colors beyond primary, tertiary, more than what breathes into her lungs, sinks into her pores, pollutes her eyes and ears, more than her streets and her books can teach her, more than the name of any color can hold.
Author’s Note: This piece inspired by Law and Order, episode #398
Dirty House Poem
Springtime in my dirty house, and the corners are adorned with tiny cobweb empires whose silkroad strings flutter in the furnace breeze, still pumping against the early morning chill. Who am I to judge these microcosmic worlds unfit to grace my home? Next door, the dogs bark through the wind-torn fence holes, push their way into my yard to sniff and dig and make their own judgements about the dandelion blooms, the overgrown rose beds, the grass that is past its mow date. I hang back, spy from the window shadows as they soak up the springtime flavors and textures to take home to unravel and interpret and compare to the sensory smorgasbord on their own side of the fence. Seasons come fractious, discontented even when settling in for the stay they know is temporary, glorious and destructive with the bipolarity of the gods.
In my house, spring is an impersonal act, a visit from an out-of-town lover who forgets me as soon as he’s gone, displaced and replaced by the next iteration whose face is the same, different, the same. The sedimentary footprints of spring mark the layered dust, my personal geology now bound to the season and its pollinated chaos and yellow air. The open windows admit it all, cobwebs are stirred and reset with winter dust left behind, already braced for the summer layers to come.
Kimberly White’s latest novel is Waterfall Girls (CLASH Books, 2021). Her poetry has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Cream City Review, Skidrow Penthouse, and other journals and anthologies. She is the author of four chapbooks, Penelope, A Reachable Tibet, The Daily Diaries of Death, and Letters to a Dead Man; as well as two other novels: Bandy’s Restola, and Hotel Tarantula. She also dabbles in other arts and spends most of her time in Northern California with her pens and papers and massive collection of Tarot decks.
