February 17, 2020

Sam Killmeyer

PLAY LIKE A BOY

The summer before I started 
seventh grade I shaved my head and never showered. 
I ran barefoot through Osage orange trees, tried my callouses 
against their thorns and rained hedge apples down
on groundhog holes, yellow flesh exploding
in sour fireworks against dirt. 
The summer before seventh grade I played 
parking lot soccer, neatly threaded the smooth rubber ball 
through the keeper’s legs, between the yellow windbreaker
and watery pothole—you play like a boy 
he said, and we both knew
it was the best compliment 
he could give, then—
his late slide tackle on hard pea gravel
and my crushed coke can arm bone 
shone in the x-ray’s relief. 
My cast was neon yellow, and I made him sign first, 
black initials on my elbow.
I wore that fiberglass sleeve
like a stinking trophy,
pushed it into people’s faces for them to sign.
The fall after I started seventh grade,
my hair grew back in tufts. 
I rested my trumpet’s bell on
grandma’s cursive, spit notes into my fist, silently 
took the extra hours to wrestle 
my left hand into forming letters.  
On team picture day 
the photographer pointed me
toward the boys, and I tried to smile 
while they laughed. The fall after I started,
I babysat a boy, showed him how to hit
a hedge apple homerun,
how to catch a frog in the scummed pond,
cup it between your palms. He wrapped it
in toilet paper, grinned, let the garage door 
down to crush it—yellow
seeping into the paper’s folds.  

from Rattle #66, Winter 2019

__________

Sam Killmeyer : “I’ve been thinking about inheritance and what has made me who I am. Not just family inheritance, but cultural inheritance. As I follow the current news cycle, I’m thinking about how we can respond to power as poets. Art is always the first thing to be suppressed by authoritative regimes. Why? Because art has the power to change minds and souls. I’m not sure these poems achieve that, but I’m trying. I’m trying to look inside myself, trying to peel back what it means to be a white, female, American.” (web)

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August 18, 2017

Sam Killmeyer

WHEN YOU TELL ME THAT YOU FEEL ALONE

how am I supposed to feel anything
but the worn basin ringed with trees sighing

through grey November days stretched out
like the cat, wet on my front porch,

waking in the morning cold and knowing only
the urge to be smothered under bed covers.

When you tell me that you feel alone
I think of standing on the grey prairie

with the sky too big for me, thoughts
blown out by common milkweed’s face,

body scraped hollow with a wrought-iron ladle
and flooded with all that was, will be, might become.

When you tell me that you feel alone
I remember being a struck lightning rod

floating above the earth, charged but nothing
through which to ground out the flames.

from Rattle #56, Summer 2017
Tribute to Poets with Mental Illness

__________

Sam Killmeyer: “I moved to Kansas from Cleveland the summer after graduating college. I was 21 and had never been west of Indiana. That fall the Flint Hills were gold-brown, crisp from drought, and standing under the giant prairie sky I felt my ‘I’ shatter. In some ways, that breakdown made room for the glimpsing of other lives that makes my poetry possible.”

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