Sally O’Brien | Rattle: Poetry

Sally O’Brien

GHAZAL FOR KENSINGTON

From Puerto Rico to Boston, all roads lead to Kensington;

the fiends find they can meet all their needs in Kensington.

They found the fourth horseman unresponsive down on Emerald St;

he’s been wandering barefoot since he lost his pale steed in Kensington.

Overhead the trestle looms like the skeleton of a snake,

the bones of the rough beast that feeds on Kensington.

In the Philly.com comments section it’s been the same old story

since Benjamin Rush said, in 1793, “Purge and bleed all Kensington!”

Boxy luxury condos popping up like toadstools on the eastern fringes.

Does the tax abatement also extend to your deeds in Kensington?

Don’t tell the transplants: their organic baby kale is still less nutritious

than the wild lambs-quarters, purslane, and chickweed of Kensington.

Next year we’ll be overrun with a new crop of sweet unruly tomatoes

if, as they say, everything is truly going to seed in Kensington.

Come by O’Brien’s class, watch the kids spin ghazals in the lunchroom.

Don’t let that Times story be the only thing you read from Kensington.

—from Poets Respond
October 16, 2018

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Sally O’Brien: “Last week, a devastating story went live on the New York Times website; the headline referred to the neighborhood where I teach as ‘the Walmart of heroin.‘ There’s been a lot of opioid-related news coming out of Kensington over the past year as the crisis has intensified and become a subject of national interest. I wish this neighborhood were not so constantly portrayed as some kind of dystopia; my students are filled with so much hope and joy and their voices never make it into articles like these. When I wrote this piece, I was thinking also of another story I read recently, where researchers in California discovered that edible wild greens, foraged in empty lots in Oakland, were more nutritious than anything available at the surrounding grocery stores, even kale.” (web)

Sally O’Brien

DANGER ISLAND

But did you hear about the penguins?

They saw the snow stained pink with krill

from space. Remember learning that word

“krill” at seven, reading about whales?

Remember smelling the ambergris at the

museum, trying to picture the albatross

in polar waters, the stove boats, the ends

of the earth stained with oil and blood?

A hundred feet in chalk, the length of

a blue whale, drawn on the sidewalk—

remember how it seemed so vast?

and how could it, when the world and

your own heart are now so cramped?

Did you hear how they counted the million

penguins with a drone? They had to warm

the drone in their jackets like a living bird.

As you hunch your shoulders against the

wind, streets treacherous with half-frozen

meltwater, do you think of the penguins?

Do you picture them in a throng, hunched

over chicks who chirp like songbirds, warm

and reeking of krill? Do you wonder at how

desolation can contain such multitudes?

You have been trying to make space within

you for the desolation you teem with—chicks

peeping, their little bodies always crawling

toward the jaws of seals. You heard you can

use your body to make space in your heart.

When you circle your awkward limbs under

water at the pool, do you compare yourself

to the penguins, graceful under the ice as

swallows in flight? when you expand with

each breath, can you see the archipelago

from space? can you see the penguins?

—from Poets Respond
March 11, 2018

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Sally O’Brien: “This week, scientists published a paper about a previously unknown ‘supercolony’ of 1.5 million Adelie penguins off the coast of Antarctica. I don’t watch TV news much anymore because it just gets to be too sad, so I didn’t hear about the discovery until someone told me about it. I was enthralled; the story made the world seem huge again, like it had when I was a child.” (web)