Site features poetry, short bio, photos, links to other Kim Addonizio webpages, and access to the Electronic Poetry Anthology of Los Angeles poet Billie Dee. Part of an ongoing non-profit anthology project which aims to bring quality poetry to the internet.
Billie Dee's
Electronic Poetry
Anthology
Kim Addonizio
Tough, vulnerable, quirky, Kim Addonizio writes with an outsider's edgy perspective on peri-millennial culture. She is co-author with Dorianne Laux of The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry, a good investment for poets at any level of expertise. She teaches privately and at Goddard College.
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Stolen Moments
What happened, happened once. So now it's best
in memory -- an orange he sliced: the skin
unbroken, then the knife, the chilled wedge
lifted to my mouth, his mouth, the thin
membrane between us, the exquisite orange,
tongue, orange, my nakedness and his,
the way he pushed me up against the fridge --
Now I get to feel his hands again, the kiss
that didn't last, but sent some neural twin
flashing wildly through the cortex. Love's
merciless, the way it travels in
and keeps emitting light. Beside the stove
we ate an orange. And there were purple flowers
on the table. And we still had hours.
-- Poetry, September, 1999
The Sound
Marc says the suffering that we don't see
still makes a sort of sound -- a subtle, soft
noise, nothing like the cries of screams that we
might think of -- more the slight scrape of a hat doffed
by a quiet man, ignored as he stands back
to let a lovely woman pass, her dress
just brushing his coat. Or else it's like a crack
in an old foundation, slowly widening, the stress
and slippage going on unnoticed by
the family upstairs, the daughter leaving
for a date, her mother's resigned sigh
when she sees her. It's like the heaving
of a stone into a lake, before it drops.
It's shy, it's barely there. It never stops.
-- The Philosopher's Club, Brockport, NY: Boa Editions Ltd., 1994
The Concept of God
Years later, nothing inside the church
has changed. Not the dusty light,
not the white feet of the statues
or the boys in their pale smocks
kneeling before the candles.
Not the cool basement, the paper plates of donuts
set out by the coffee urns.
Not the bathroom with its stall doors open
on a row of immaculate toilets,
blue water in the bowls,
a small wrapped soap on each sink.
Forever the two girls leaning against the wall
in the deep quiet, sharing a lipsticked Salem
and watching themselves in the mirror,
forever the priest nodding in the confessional,
closing and opening and closing his small window.
Always my father moving down the rows
of bored, sonorous voices, passing the long-handled basket,
my mother with his handkerchief pinned over her hair.
Always, too, his coffin before the altar, my brother
stammering a eulogy, the long line of parked cars
spattered with snow. Always this brief moment
when the candles shudder, then resume,
and the girl holding the cigarette peers more closely
into the mirror, startled for an instant
at how old, how much like a woman
it makes her look.
-- The Philosopher's Club, Brockport, NY: Boa Editions Ltd., 1994
Address
Lacking the intimate tu, and with thou
fallen out of fashion, I can only use
a neutral word, one that won't allow
me to explain how, as I lose
myself in that hour of the afternoon
when I feel most afraid, uncertain
of what's coming, knowing only that it's soon --
how as I lie down, drawing the curtains
like a patient in a hospital, I'm filled
with what the day's forgotten, all the stray
images, stories, the small acts of will
that won't matter, the sound of the bay
insistent, meaningless, without clues --
how I want to say it, what I most fear losing:
-- The Philosopher's Club, Brockport, NY: Boa Editions Ltd., 1994
But
They'd known each other a month and had decided to marry, but two days before the wedding she hit him over the head with a beer bottle during an argument and the paramedics had to come and he got sixteen stitches but what the hell, they reconciled as soon as they were sober. And then the wedding, a party in the warehouse space he lived in, and everyone still drinking and dancing as they headed off to a big hotel in the city. But the friend who was going to loan them a Lincoln to arrive in style never showed up, so they took the groom's old car and pulled up and staggered into the lobby, but with his bandaged head and the two of them being pretty wasted and some kind of complication about the name on the credit card -- another friend had arranged for the room -- the hotel refused to let them register. So back to his car, the old car that had no passenger window and now wouldn't start. He tried to hotwire it but somehow pulled out the ignition wire instead, after a while he got the car going but it had started to rain, hard, and they had to drive back home with her getting soaked and him holding one hand out the window to help the wiper blade sweep back and forth. At home the party was still going but by now the two of them wanted to be alone, and a nasty argument broke out between the groom and a few revelers who didn't want to leave, but finally they did and the newlyweds went to sleep after the bride threw up in a hand-painted ceramic pasta bowl someone had given them. In the morning they made love and things seemed better but when she got out of bed to pee she stepped on a piece of glass from a broken bottle, maybe the one she'd broken over his head the other night or maybe one of the several that had been broken the night before, and it was back to calling the ambulance and now no one has seen them for three days but htye're probably fine, just holed up together in marital bliss, not killing each other with one of the guns he keeps, sometimes things start out badly but get better, by now they're surely better, they couldn't possibly screw things up any futher but maybe they could.
-- In the Box Called Pleasure, Black Ice Books, 1999
Other Links
Books
The Philosopher's Club
Jimmy and Rita
In the Box Called Pleasure
The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry
Tell Me
