​Alexandra van de Kamp​
​

Safe Gravy
 
--thanks to autocorrect, iPhone 12
 
I was trying to say safe travels
I was trying to type to a sister boarding a plane,
a sister with a sad way of arranging her face.
I was trying to do justice to the August trees, to the way
we drown in our thoughts
 
a little each day.
 
I’ve lost count of how many times
list has become lust—bees
became bras, and fees, frogs.
 
I was trying to communicate my impressions:
--the wind discoing between panic and glee
--the articles on sloths I consume
like piping hot Darjeeling tea.
Did you know a sloth takes one month
to digest a leaf?
 
And I try not to mind when love becomes live
because isn’t living a constant slipping? A to-ing
and fro-ing around love, and its many misspellings?                                                 
 
The other day, you became bayou—the self as a slow-moving,
murky, and rather sloppy outlet. I had to pause a bit,
 
consider the geography and humid ramifications of this.
 
But I admit I must quibble when fibs in the news
fiddle with their bibs, drooling on all of us
with their vertiginous spit! Fib, fib, fib!
 
This world a masterful whodunnit, with its
hiccupping detectives and missing witnesses;
its opaque, shifting definitions.                                                                                                           
 
And just now, my sister’s name, Vikki,
was corrected to bikini. And all I could think of
was the 1959 surfer movie, Gidget, starring Sandra Dee,
and how, in a matter of 95 minutes, teen angst and major
life decisions are solved along an endlessly stretching
California beach.
​Skunk Perfume
           “It’s not the houses that were built but the spaces between the houses…”
                                                                                       --Flaubert
 
The billowing brunt of it, the not-Chanel-Noº5 whiff as the bitter-balloon swells
and puffs through our house—disrupted the pearl-blue shroud of our night.
 
Who knew we lived on a cloud? Who keeps count of the spaces animals track
when we are not thinking of animal-pockets and wild needs?
 
Our world is a heaving of dialects, grass-tangled designs, the cracked terra incognito
of a tree’s winter bark, and cages of all kinds, such as the ones
 
the “humane” trapper, hired by our landlord, set for the family of five
hibernating under our house. Skunks
 
hanker for marshmallows. Skunks circle and circle within a steel-tight
cage-frame. I see one stilled, hunkered down, collapsed cloud in a helpless-wait.
 
A cage as a doorless house; a cul-de-sac we crawl into; an Alice-in-Wonderland falling-down-
the-wrong-hole-plot. A frustration-stage
 
set by ourselves or someone else. Can we ever articulate the narratives that breed their way
into our dankest spaces? The elusive perfumes of our rage? Our beliefs
 
stain-glass-luminescent or shattering. And those skunks? Nonaggressive, steadfast diggers,
only spraying their acrid liquid as a last resort; eaters of insects, rodents and small creatures.
 
Need set against need. In the news, two bodies are found tucked away in the landing gear
of a plane. Imagine the decisions those two people made; imagine trying to get from New York
 
to Florida by holding onto the wing of a plane.
--
Alexandra van de Kamp is the Executive Director for Gemini Ink, San Antonio’s Writing Arts Center. Her most recent book of poems is Ricochet Script (2022), published by Next Page Press. Previous collections of poems include: Kiss/Hierarchy (Rain Mountain Press 2016) and The Park of Upside-Down Chairs (CW Books 2010). She has also published several chapbooks, including A Liquid Bird Inside the Night (Red Glass Books 2015) and Dear Jean Seberg (2011), which won the 2010 Burnside Review Chapbook Contest. Her poems have been published in journals nationwide, such as The Cincinnati Review, The Texas Observer, Denver Quarterly, 32Poems, Tahoma Literary Review, and Sweet: A Literary Confection. Her work has been featured on VerseDaily and received Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations.