Stephen Kampa
Associate Editor Caitlin Doyle: In his poem “The Collectors,” Stephen Kampa explores a far too common figure in American life, “a nearly / incomprehensible boy” who walks into a “fear-flung classroom” with a gun. In taut language layered with complex and often paradoxical implications, Kampa examines the human tendency to fit other people into narratives that serve our own mythologies of self. The poem, much like the troubled figure at its center, remains “impervious / to simple explanations” as Kampa probes the relationship between stories and bodies, living and dead.
The Collectors
“In the end, what collectors amass are stories. Stories body forth well in things.” —Lia Purpura
This explains why he had to
shoot them, each bullet a full stop at the story’s end,
their stories now his stories,
the ones he tells himself over and over the way
a gun buff will lift a bright
postbellum Remington, explicate its intricate
engravings, then knock us dead
with its provenance, its uses and famous shooters,
as a means of owning it
more fully. He owns them now—the shit they were wearing,
their snotty red expressions,
their wimp-ass bargains and puppy-dog glances, the last
postures their living bodies
assumed—and we own him, have collected another
story in which a nearly
incomprehensible boy, one now impervious
to simple explanations,
enters a fear-flung classroom somewhere too much like here—
Pearl, Springfield, Red Lake, Blacksburg,
Jonesboro, Santa Fe, Parkland, Newtown, Columbine—
to create his own master
list. What are we to say? Thus assembled, the writer
writes, objects in a list are
always whispering into the ear of their neighbor.
Stephen Kampa is the author of three collections of poetry: Cracks in the Invisible, Bachelor Pad, and Articulate as Rain. His work appeared in The Best American Poetry 2018. He currently teaches at Flagler College.
For more miCRo pieces, CLICK HERE
