Kim Triedman
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Kim Triedman has worked in both poetry and fiction. Her first poetry collection – "bathe in it or sleep" – was named winner of this year’s Main Street Rag Chapbook Competition and has just been released by Main Street Rag Publishing Company. In the past year, she’s also been named finalist for the 2007 Phil brick Poetry Award, finalist for the 2008 James Jones First Novel Fellowship, semi-finalist for the 2008 Black River Chapbook Competition and semi-finalist for the 2008 Parthenon Prize for Fiction.
Her poems have been published/accepted widely by literary journals and anthologies, including Appalachia, The Aurorean, Albatross, The New Writer, Byline Magazine, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Journal, Main Street Rag, Poetry Monthly, Current Accounts, Ghoti Magazine, IF Poetry Journal, Great Kills Review, Trespass Magazine, ART TIMES, and FRiGG Magazine.
In addition, one of her recent poems was selected by the poet John Ashbery to be included in the Ashbery Resource Center’s online catalogue, a comprehensive bibliography of Ashbery’s work and of work by artists directly influenced by him. She is a graduate of Brown University and lives in Arlington.
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Choke-Hold
but winter:
howling,
chill-choked;
knife-blue sky sharpening
its edge against
the iron of the earth.
Every day an accusation,
even the trees:
branches like bones
pointing,
pewter shards of ice.
It’s a lot of
work, this breathing
and breathing:
wind-wheezed;
eyes seamed against
the steel; red hands
weeping white. Air is
less than air. Even
the cypresses
gasping,
drained of color; more
black than green.
Think of it this way:
Between the past and the future
stands a house. It’s tidy
and white, nearly ready
to explode. The terror, you see, the
weight of such a thing:
neither here nor there, like words
withheld, or the hand
that meant to stroke.
Even in a strong wind leaves
can double-back, and
seagulls hang, frozen in sky.
We sit,
burning in silence:
eyes forward -
remembering nothing.
Once removed
your mind a bluish thing, twilit.
I have felt it, many times:
the squint of eyes, abstraction of hands,
the light of late afternoon
laddering its way through
broken clouds; even the cormorants,
blacker than oil, hanging their wings
out to dry. The way you
follow a thought like a tune,
half-listening-half-dreaming, in and out
of time, plumbing its bluish depths.
Never mind: I am not meant
to understand. The rocks are
black, the seaweed roils like
tangled dreadlocks in the foam;
the tonguing of the waves. Your face
a blank.
