PSH: Poets of the Week

Kimberly E. Ruth
kimberly.e.ruth@gmail.com

Bio (auto)

Kimberly Ruth is a recent graduate from SUNY New Paltz where she studied photography and journalism. She plans to attend graduate school in the fall, where she will work towards an MFA in fine art. She is the author of the forthcoming chapbook, Said the Oyster to the Fly (Pudding House Press) and an e-chapbook, Between Cardboard Mountains (Gold Wake Press), which is available for free at http://goldwakepress.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/cardboard.pdf. You can view samples of her art at http://kimberlyruth.blogspot.com. She lives in New Paltz, NY.

Routine

The suitcase in her hand,
weighs her frail body
down
like an anvil supported
or a cinderblock
by a single thread of floss.

Her body is a single thread of floss.
and the house is an empty suitcase.

At my half-Jewish grandmother’s grave
Mother’s Day, 2009

I pick up a rock, no
a pebble
and place it above her
name.

There are many pebbles
to choose from.

I choose the first one I see.

In the car
Mom wrapped wet paper
towels and tinfoil around the stems
of two yellow flowers.

She wrote a message on it
with black marker.

To me, it still just looked like crushed
tinfoil and material

for a poem.

Joint Ventures

Let’s go build a house
of sticks or straw and

let’s stand outside it
hand linked in linked

hand, fingers crossed,
and breath held.

We are a wind protection system

with nothing but a thin night
gown as our defense.

The White Fence

I watched it go up
from our window.

Each day men pounded
nails and grounded it

into place. The weight
of their heavy bodies

leaning against it,
made me cringe. I thought

about hard things, resilient
things, like bomb shelters

and elementary school
desks. I closed the blinds.

Yeah, that little house will be just fine.

The Art of Clamming

It was fun, then,

squishing our toes
in the mud and

creating a whirl-pool
of black.

We destroyed many
homes that summer

in our one-piece
bathing suits.

Mom and Dad waved
at us from the sand,

Dad with a mini-pitchfork
in his hand,

giving us a thumbs up.

Eric Hamilton
oldestboyjersey@yahoo.com

Bio (auto)

Eric Hamilton is a deranged artist who paints everything from canvas to freight trains. He also writes poetry and enjoys sharing his spoken word at slams or cafes everywhere from NYC out to LA. He was born and raised in Las Vegas, spent a lot of time living in east Los Angeles, and is now unemployed and attending college as a journalism major in New Jersey, where you can find him at art galleries and coffee shops politicking with the poets, art-fags, and random transient folk. He's a bit of a broken man who receives a lot of undeserved attention from women, smokes cigarettes, stumbles in and out of short-term relationships looking for love, spends most of his time waiting for lung cancer and responses from publishers, and is known to occasionally set fire to a booklet of poems aged with the experience of time.

1985th chorus

we sat slumped
impressionable
....................lumps
...............of
wine thinned flesh,
about the stoops and stairs
of financially impaired fall-
.....................................outs

among particles
of brick and mortar
the buildings refused.

.....collecting shoeprints
.....on our moth-
.....eaten shirtbacks,

.........................clicking
....................our
...............box-
..........cutter
.....blades
in
and
.....out; or

..........whistling
.....(fingers
curled 'round clumps
of stolen candy,)

at women old enough
to be our mothers
who taught us fresh swear-
words to spout in different contexts.

.....we were cool-aid mustaches
.....and filthy hands
.....cut and scraped
.....with lessons learned
.....the hard way,

making cellblock reservations from the womb
and cramping
...............in the growling guts
...............of what
you would call
the ghetto.

I had to flush twice.

pulling the bra
from a fresh pack
of cancer sticks

bare assed and
on the wintered face
of a porcelain sanctity,

flame dancing wild
at the head of my cigarette
as it reduced to cherry

and I blew believable
smoke signals
to a human race
that couldn't possibly exist.

correcting my posture
only to realize
everything,

everyone is dead and
the art is hung
.....................................crooked.

( it looked as if christ and his disciples
were having the last supper on a hillside. )

nowhere else on earth
could be this peaceful,

the churn of toilet water
was like a calm spring
flowing through distant
meadow,

until the shit escaped me
until the underlying truth of the world
escaped me.

Manifest destination

Winant BLVD. (RT-46)

a school of fish flowed by me
as I stood waiting for the bus

(which would be a whale in this metaphor)

their current fed the gust
that sent embers sizzling
at my cheeks, as I lipped
a cigarette failing
.........to keep ash

but rather,
embracing its own naked cherry
.........like a dandelion in a hurricane.

NJTRANSIT 05:20PM 24APR09(168)

each blotch of earth
that slid past the window
bored me more than
the one before it,

until I saw this little boy
who looked like a king
on top of a flipped over barbie-
car, stomping up and down
as if conquering a world
waiting to eat him alive.

his mother watching
from their porch steps
her hair glowing sun-lit
like that of a doll
with a frozen smile about
her embossed face,

had her child not
been so alive,
I would believe
she never breathed
at all.

a mannequin mother
with eyes sewn into
the rest of her life.

Veteran DR./Bergenline AVE.

fresh from the belly
of a mechanical whale,
I watched the wind
molesting everything.

the trees bent away
in utter disgust,
some of their branches
reached for soil
as the sun kept track
of it all, with the same bright-
white beams
.............that tried to blind me.

winter is dead.