Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: Moving at the speed of thought, this powerful list poem demonstrates how politics can affect intimacy, especially for those the State attempts to marginalize through legislation. It bridges the genres of love poem and political poem, asking if anyone has ever “cared / about a stranger.” Though the speaker wants everything else “less present” when they kiss their partner, some ways of thinking are impossible to avoid in the wake of fear. Read more of KB’s work in their new collection Freedom House, which will be released on June 6.
To hear KB read the poem, click here:
What’s on your mind, KB?
How much cloth & cotton & 2 stabs
of chemicals you can’t name
saves you. Did Waffle House ever
shut down? Has anyone ever cared
about a stranger, or is care also a man
-made abstraction? When I’m kissing
my partner, I’d like to focus on her
kissing me, not the redness ringing
on my ears from masking while asleep.
Not the cop car yelling “Be afraid” while flashing
U.S. red & blue; intrusive thoughts—
wondering if I’ll fail at life, at staying
alive, at doing whatever this is—I want all of it
less present when my eyes close & her lips
meet mine. Clouds part above us & our tongues flicker.
I remember we’re in an avoidable pandemic
& we live in a state with no care for our kiss.
My eyes force-open, the car has trouble
starting, the food is cold & hairy, the date is
over before it starts. I wonder if the businessman
next to us knows freedom—is he freckled
& always frightened like me? Is He on earth
blending in with all the other devils
like COVID & cops, like everything that got us in
this place? My partner puckers up
for a finale. A bug flies into my face
like there isn’t all this room to roam. Cops exist
like there isn’t all this room to love. I kiss her
cheek instead & say sorry.
KB Brookins is a writer, cultural worker, and artist from Texas. They are the author of How To Identify Yourself with a Wound (Kallisto Gaia Press, 2022) and Freedom House (Deep Vellum, 2023). KB is a 2023 National Endowment of the Arts fellow. Follow them online at @earthtokb.
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