Courtney Kampa

November 17, 2022

“Baby Love” by Courtney KampaPosted by

Courtney Kampa

BABY LOVE

Gregory had a mole below his left eye
and sometimes kids in our 5th grade class 
would tease him, saying he had chocolate 
on his face. I was the girl who knew it 
was his left eye and not his right. Who listened 
in secret to Oldies 100—music like Baby Love by the Supremes 
and knew every Patsy Cline song by heart. Gregory 
didn’t backpack pocket blades to school like Richard 
or look up girls’ skirts beneath the monkey bars 
the way Kenny did, whose mom let him watch 
all the Late Night TV he wanted. He was nothing 
like Vinny who’d steal the grape juice box 
off your desk when you weren’t looking.
And he didn’t mock William, whose dad worked hard
for a gasoline company—gasoline has the word gas
in it, which all the cool kids thought 
was pretty funny; really classic. Gregory had immaculate 
Ticonderoga erasers and he made my knee-socks droop 
and he made my weak bony ankles 
weaker. At recess before summer a soft piece of sidewalk 
tar was thrown at my feet and I looked up 
and there he was, skipping backwards, a rocket wanting 
me to chase him. Mrs. Rivers led him off to suggest 
alternative ways of procuring
female attention and in those awful green uniform pants
he looked back at me and winked—which is not 
something the average 5th grader does
to another 5th grader. Three weeks later his winking face was fed
into the teeth of a triple car wreck. Eleven years 
and I’m still mouthing the triple syllables 
of his name. Not because he needs me to
but because I have no alternative way of procuring 
his attention. At school I quit talking, Colin inches 
from my face taunting SAY-SOME-THING
but I didn’t, so now I will say something, I will say 
that I cried at our class talent show, watching Gregory’s mom 
out in the audience, shirt mis-buttoned, camera readied,
looking for him, and seeing him
nowhere. I will say that with Gregory gone there was no one 
to stop the boys from snapping 
Stephen’s stutter like a twig across their knees. I’ll say ours 
was a misfit purity. That after art he gave me 
his scissors and I swapped 
him mine, both blades aimed forward, looking at each other 
like we’d just done something 
dangerous. Handles inked with initials 
in handwriting not his, marked the way mothers mark us carefully
when we walk into the world. I’ll say that I still 
have them. Gregory, ask me to name a thing 
as indestructibly beautiful as you, and I cannot. Time disfigures 
those who breathe and those of us who no longer can
but none of that has touched you. Not the cruelty 
of children. Not the gravel and glass
that pushed their way into your green 
restless legs. Not the ugliness of an ambulance
come too late. Not the small grass square 
that mothers and quilts you. Not even the skid marks 
below your brother’s eyes, tire treads 
red across his chest. Love is nothing
if not what takes its time. It takes sweet 
time and it took tar but was taken 
by tar and it’s taken eleven years of not trusting 
the pitch of my voice or the shamed 
insufficiency of what I have 
to say—that at your service I got no further 
than taking a holy card from the altar boy; picture 
of an angel as dark-haired as you: an angel I’d soon shred 
to ribbons, my hand around those handles for the first
and only time. Gregory, think of me 
in St. Joe’s parking lot in July in a sweaty cotton skirt. 
Think of my confession to that angel, in his headband 
of light, how much I liked 
him too. Hoping you had stopped a moment 
in the beatific beating of your wings; in the now-familiar strumming 
of that strange, beseeching harp.
 

—from Rattle #42, Winter 2013
Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist

__________

Courtney Kampa: “I wrote ‘Baby Love’ four years ago while attending the University of Virginia.” (web)

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July 28, 2020

“Poems About Grace” by Courtney KampaPosted by

Courtney Kampa

POEMS ABOUT GRACE

Ust Kamenogorsk, Kazakhstan

I.

The video was soft and grainy
as an ultrasound: 11 seconds of a caretaker
holding a baby girl up by the armpits

like a potted plant. When the woman bounced
her in the air, the infant shivered
the way petals do when wind grasps a stem

too thin, too breakable to hold.
We stood a foot from the screen
for hours. Rewind, and play. Rewind, and play.

Inside us, something raised and gathered
like a scar. We were an ache—a gash sealed
for someone other than ourselves.

My husband boiled pots and pots of tea.
We wouldn’t sleep—that baby out there, burning.
Remote and lonely as a star.

II.

At the orphanage she learned early
not to cry—no one came.
Twelve children per nurse, she lay

with sleeves safety-pinned
to the mattress. By mid-afternoon
her window darkened like a clot:

blackness welled up and pooling—
pushing even the clouds
from their sky. Maybe in the stillness

she heard a starling. Maybe she wanted
to sing too—got as far as opening her mouth—but
didn’t know any songs.

III.

To adopt, you visit first.
This is labor:
It is unpinning your baby’s arms

from her crib of toothpicks
and lead paint. It is her squirm when caressed:
caught between an instant of panic

and her lifelong yearn.
It is the cautious curl against a mother’s chest;
how her brown lips part like an upturned beak

as you darn the holes in her clothes. The punctures
made when fettered to her sheets. It is your impulse
to encircle her like a womb. To feel her

breathe and kick in her sleep. To hear her heart
faintly against yours—that pregnant syncopation
you thought you’d never know.

IV.

Touch had turned her hungry—all night
she wailed, her mouth the O
of an open drain.

The next day a nurse yelled
you’ve ruined her—held her too much.
The vein running up her neck

stood out like a blue cable.
She had taught this child what was good
to know: that life would be low pitched

and solo. That dream is just another word
for tunnel. That to be born means the same
as to barrel—the way a train does

from its station. The way this child had, from the body
of the mother
who, first, cut her brakes.

V.

Her toes, like tiny golden hooks, pulled
me up from the world. Mornings she
put the undersides of her feet together,

as though in prayer. I learned a new way to talk
to God—her little feet
in my mouth, in each sentence

I spoke. Once, seeing her socks on the staircase,
the shape of two white eggs,
I burst, grateful, into tears.

VI.

—Did I come from your tummy?
—No, but Grace, you came from my heart.
She hears this, and stretches wide

like the confident roots of a flower.
An outward, earthen stir.
See how her veined palm draws, gently,

toward the roots in mine? Our dangling threads
crocheted into a trellis, like lace—a helix

we’ve doubled and twisted
by hand.

—from Rattle #46, Winter 2014
Readers’ Choice Award Winner

__________

Courtney Kampa: “For me, this was one of those poems you write knowing you’ll never do the beauty of the subject justice, and feel all the luckier for it. I’ll take the ineffable any day.”

 

Courtney Kampa is tonight’s guest on the Rattlecast! Click here to watch …

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February 1, 2020

“Self-Portrait By Someone Else” by Courtney KampaPosted by

Courtney Kampa

SELF-PORTRAIT BY SOMEONE ELSE

The afternoon we traced our 2nd grade bodies
with poster paint, legs V-shaped on paper
like the outlines of victims at a crime scene,
I was the only girl stuck partnered with a boy—
his fists filthy from prying back scalps
of onion grass, bug shells crushed up in his teeth
because he’d liked the sound. He refused
all paint-colors but blue. Leaned over me,
complaining loudly to his friends. Then his lip,
heavy with focus. And the red wing
of his tongue. Dragging his paintbrush
like a match in a room of gasoline. The week before
Debbie Kaw passed a note saying babies
came from standing too close to a boy,
or if one sweat on you, or spat
in your direction. So the girls called it brave, what I did,
letting one trace me. And I let them think so—
let them run ahead in the carpool line,
the blood still returning to my knees.
Let my mother hang it full length on the refrigerator.
The white space something I’d stepped from.
Its thick blue line sort of wobbly
between my thighs, where his hands shook.
In the mornings my little sister would stand
on one foot, looking at it. Her groggy pajamas.
Her hands playing in her lunatic hair.

—from Rattle #36, Winter 2011
Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist

__________

Courtney Kampa: “One of the many 23-year-olds in New York City, I’m from Virginia and miss it.” (web)

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April 15, 2019

“In Charlottesville After Charlottesville” by Courtney KampaPosted by

Courtney Kampa

IN CHARLOTTESVILLE AFTER CHARLOTTESVILLE

Tonight they’ve hung up lights in lilts across 2nd
and Water Street on the downtown mall, a Christmas choir

singing Oh Holy Night—twenty-four people lined
against the painted brick wall, its peeling curls—the wall

Will knelt beside on one knee, face full of fear, a sidewalk of gum
and toppled ice cream, to ask if I could always call him

mine—the same wall we crouched against in August,
shielding our heads with our arms, our bags, our books,

whatever we brought along that might protect us
from the rocks and spit they threw,

their emptied tear gas canisters hurled by arms roaring
with blood, their faces doing that angry Goya thing

with the colors. My mother called hours
after Heather breathed last, called

to make sure our front door was locked;
that I remembered tomorrow was a Holy Day

of Obligation, and if I didn’t go to church it would be
a mortal sin. Her own version of danger. That time in August

flowers weren’t blooming but there was one frail rose
on our rented front yard, and we could see it

from the upstairs window, the rose, but also
the gunmetal gray Dodge, plate GVF 1111, three houses

down, abandoned and blood-caked from taking
Heather’s life and mowing over others, full throttle forward

then revved into reverse, the steel front bumper
severed, like two arms bent, palms up

and sorry. A car to take a person places, not to take
someone away, and at the window Will became more beautiful

to me, his fingers on the glass, all of them his. Now, sort of,
mine too. The driver ran into the woods to crouch

and hide out like a squirrel. We walked our dog
through those woods that morning, green

and lush, as if beauty’s sole defense
is to always just be beautiful. On that Feast of the Assumption

Charlottesville opened their eyes as if a body
punctured. Tiki torches on fire. Adult children playing

with their fathers’ guns. There is a sound a body makes
when bounced off the hood of a car

that no one should hear. Tonight snow falls
peacefully, and the choir sings Fall

on your knees, and because we have nothing else to give, we do.

—from Rattle #62, Winter 2018
Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist

__________

Courtney Kampa: “Charlottesville is where I fell in love, both with the man I married and also with writing, as a student at UVA. Everything I am thankful to have, I owe to Charlottesville. It’s difficult to fully express. That affront to everyone’s humanity was not just evil, but deeply personal. It was in our backyard, and the backyards of those I love so utterly much. So I wrote the poem. It took five months to make sure that what I had written had done its best little attempt to get it okay. It’s still not okay, and it never will be.” (web)

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February 15, 2015

2014 Rattle Poetry Prize Readers’ Choice AwardPosted by

Rattle is proud to announce the winner of the 2014 Rattle Poetry Prize Readers’ Choice Award:

Courtney Kampa

Courtney Kampa
New York, NY
for
“Poems About Grace”

The 2014 Readers’ Choice Award was selected from among the Rattle Poetry Prize Finalists by subscriber vote. Only those with active subscriptions including issue #46 were eligible. Of roughly 4,000 possible voters, 565 cast ballots, and Kampa’s poem earned 31%. The award is $1,000. Here is what some of those readers had to say about their choice:

So beautifully done, about a subject that could easily have become overly sentimental were it not for the restraint the poet shows. The words, well chosen, perfectly convey the longing of both child and (new) mother. A memorable piece of work!
—Susan Berlin

“Poems About Grace” is touching and significant. Rarely has a poem about motherhood drawn me so completely into the experience. The whole context of the adoption is brought forth vividly and with immediacy, involving the reader in the confluence of needs and yearnings that bring mother and daughter together. This is a poem that deserves to find its way to anthologies and be kept for a very long time. Obviously this is a writer to pay attention to.
—David W. Parsley

The expression of love for one’s child moved with a soft beautiful rhythm. The poem danced in metaphor and sent me running to hug my own children.
—Thomas Leduc

The way her poems connect thought and emotion from section to section produces a vibrant awareness of the interconnectedness between a mother and daughter who find their own familiarity when blood doesn’t lend it freely, a feeling expressed masterfully in the last line: “Our dangling threads/ crocheted into a trellis, like lace—a helix/ we’ve doubled and twisted/ by hand.” In this last line’s holding out of the message for the poem as a whole, the reader is confronted with the truth of Kampa’s words for parents and children generally, whether adopted or no. The trellis shape of each stanza, the transience of thin lace, and the helix which both acts as genetic inheritance and a handmade ladder to what will come in their future lives all rise to the attention of the reader in this last phrasing. Kampa’s final words crystallize for a brief moment the simultaneous feelings of having created a newfound strength and the excitement of the questions and conversations for the mother and daughter that are yet to come.
—Jeremy Reed

I thought this sequence was the most moving and original among the finalist poems, well-crafted yet unpredictable in its turns, with a strangeness that struck me as true to the experience recounted, and not something imposed on the poem from without. Some of the similes and metaphors made me gasp. I love the danger in this work, and the openness.
—Cecilia Woloch

“Poems About Grace” is a heart-breakingly beautiful, poignant poem about grace of all kinds. On the literal level it is a simple story of a couple who longs for a child, then finds and adopts a baby from a harsh, over-crowded orphanage. She becomes the beloved child. The five part poem speaks to the nature of grace during this journey. The “Grace” of the title may be the name of the baby, but “grace” is the poem’s unifying metaphor for the tender-fierce love that throbs in every line.
—Margaret Anne Gratton

To read the poem, pick up a copy of Rattle #46, or wait until the spring, when the poems start appearing online at Rattle.com.

Kampa’s “Poems About Grace” was the clear winner, but all ten of the finalist poems received a significant number of votes, and each had their own enthusiastic fans. It’s always a fun and informative experience reading all the commentary, and to provide a taste of that here is a small sample of what our subscribers said about the other finalists:

On Josh Bontrager’s “My Father Worked Piece Rate …”

As many times as the read the poem to myself, and out loud to my partner who was sitting next to me at the diner, him reading his mortgage blog and saying, “Oh yea, I remember, the Schult Mobile Home Plant was a real thing.” And that’s why my vote for this poem, it’s too real. It’s as tangible in an ephemeral world as the men in work boots sitting in the booths around us, and the steam that comes from their coffee into their own trucks, with their own stories. But we tell the one how they’re all the same.
—Victoria McArtor

On Samantha Deal’s “Taxonomy of an Automobile Accident”

“Taxonomy of an Automobile Accident” by Samantha Deal is one of those poems you want to show to others–I printed it off and shared it with my wife who did a PhD thesis, some years ago, in the acquisition of language in children. I found her comment to be telling: “Naming is where the world begins.” This poem takes the reader to school, and on so many levels. The line “How many hands am I not holding / right now?” is the turn line for me … From that point on I know that I’m in the sort of “good hands” I recognize from having been exposed to forceful work before. Smart work, indeed.
—Roy Bentley

On Stephen Kampa’s “How to Meet the Love of Your Life”

It’s rare that a poem makes me laugh out loud, but Stephen Kampa had me laughing through all four pages. He nails the voice of the self-help book, in a poem styled like no other.
—Melvin Gulley

On James Davis May’s “Reality Auction”

Witty, refreshing and entertaining in a way that lasts like a conversation we keep having about our favourite film or character in a book. I wish I could have attended the auction.
—Vanessa Shields

On Jack Powers’ “Holy Shitballs!”

This is a poem that effortlessly maneuvers within a surprisingly wide range of narrative complexity. It’s funny and touching and not in the least sentimental (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
—Arne Weingart

On Sarah Pemberton Strong’s “A Story”

As a poem that is interested in how we think, it struck me how free of artifice or pretension it is, how clear and honest. It shares a remarkable story, reflects on that story, and in this act it shines light on how we react to the unusual, the unexpected, the miraculous–and that moment we are given where the boy returns to find the snake transformed into the mouse (at least, that must be what the scene first looked like to him)—is as close to a miracle as poetry is able to give us. And to show the reader the search for self in this story, the projection of one’s own identity into another’s situation, another’s body, is shockingly affecting, beautifully honest.
—Brandon Amico

On Wendy Videlock’s “The Night Relies”

The music in this piece is stunning, and though rhymed tetrameter lines can often sound singsongy or contrived, there’s something hymn-like about this piece that invites that form. It is especially effective, in fact, against the content (“the camouflage is in conforming”), which praises the rebellious spirit and the potential to rabble-rouse that live within the mythological and theological icons she invokes; to have a regular meter, a ringing bell of a poem, stands in contrast to the beauty of singing one’s own tune. Anyway, it’s pretty and I’m a fan of sound-play, and she does it well.
—Jessica Piazza

On Mike White’s “Fathers”

“Fathers” is dense and pointed, in a way that allows it to be truly wide and open to its enormous spirit. I also loved the word play. It reminds me of my father’s basement workshop, which was both a place to create and a place to hide.
—Scott Farrar

On Shangrila Willy’s “The Nightly Villanelle of Their Twelfth Year”

Willy dares to speak of impotence in a marriage, not that uncommon due to a variety of issues, often health-related. She uses the villanelle form with its repeating lines in conjunction with carefully chosen words that serve double-meanings for reflecting the unspoken desire (“ache”), the nagging fears (“long”), and wishful thinking (“lie”) that refrain in permutations in the lines as it does in the minds of the couple as they consider their untenable situation. She also conveys the back and forth from dream state to waking state that one often experiences lying in bed thinking intertwined with the other’s thinking, from the contrasting realities conveyed in the 1st and 3rd lines that are repeated in the form: “she lies awake/ he longs for her to wake.” I applaud Willy for her brilliant layering of mind, dream, and state of being.
—Sandra P. Wassilie

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October 2, 2014

“Nocturne in What Now Feels Like a Very Silly Dress” by Courtney KampaPosted by

Courtney Kampa

NOCTURNE IN WHAT NOW FEELS LIKE A VERY SILLY DRESS

Tonight there are no taxis
in Harlem, and the moon is somewhere,
mustering itself the way a man does
to take himself to someone else.
You know this night. The one so large you can stand full height
inside it, your eyes blade level
with its throat. And this street, you know it too: busy intersection
where you speak a little louder to be heard
above the blood inside you, gunning
two directions like traffic down a bridge. The taxi, if you could find one,
is for only you, though he is standing here—
because though he’s just left you, he won’t leave you
until he’s seen you safely
on your way—the good-guy, the gentleman, fearing nothing
so much as appearing not to be. He has to think a little louder to be heard
above these speeches corked
inside him, the ones he knows you wouldn’t listen to
in a way he would enjoy. He has watched you die
before. His silence, which is a doorlessness
the street comes, also, to resemble. His hands half-hidden
in his shirt sleeves, like a boy.

—from Rattle #43, Spring 2014
Tribute to Love Poems

__________

Courtney Kampa: “Why write? Revenge.”

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September 15, 2013

2013 Rattle Poetry Prize WinnersPosted by

Rattle is proud to announce the winner of the 2013 Rattle Poetry Prize:

Roberto Ascalon

“The Fire This Time”
by
Roberto Ascalon
Seattle, WA

__________

Finalists:

“A Poem for Women Who Don’t Want Children”
Chanel Brenner
Santa Monica, CA

“My Mother Told Us Not to Have Children”
Rebecca Gayle Howell
Lubbock, TX

“Baby Love”
Courtney Kampa
New York, NY

“What He Must Have Seen”
Stephen Kampa
Daytona Beach, FL

“Man on Mad Anthony”
Bea Opengart
Cincinatti, OH

“Laundry List”
Michelle Ornat
Elma, NY

“Man on the Floor”
Jack Powers
Fairfield, CT

“Basic Standards Test”
Danez Smith
St. Paul, MN

“Who Breathed in Binders”
Patricia Smith
Howell, NJ

“Of You”
Wendy Videlock
Grand Junction, CO

 

These eleven poems will be published in the Winter issue of Rattle this December. Each of the Finalists are also eligible for the $1,000 Readers’ Choice Award, to be selected by entrant and subscriber vote (the voting period is December 1, 2013 – February 15, 2014).

Another nine poems were selected for standard publication, and offered a space in the open section of a future issue. These poets will be notified individually about details, but they are: Jacqueline Berger, Daniel Bohnhorst, Jackleen Holton, Sharon Kessler-Farchi, Michael Meyerhofer, Kathleen Nolan, Charlotte Pence, Sam Sax, and Timothy Schirmer.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the competition, which would not have been a success without your diverse and inspiring poems. We received a record 2,105 entries and well over 8,000 poems, and it was an honor to read each of them.

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