Gordon Kippola
The Dying Sometimes Smile
An alien browses the canned food aisles
at Walmart, that one near the hospital.
When the alien is feeling hungry
to be known, it paces hospital halls
instead. When humans die, just as they pass,
their vision can expand to see a ghost,
a wider spectrum of the colors green,
love and orange, or a small visitor
who comes to say: We’re not alone. Hello.
Poet Understanding Water
Agua, vand, wasser, ujë, su,
vesi, eau, amanzi, biyah:
all water; but not all waters.
Steam, ice, salt wave, demarcation,
rain’s salvation, land-erasing
flood, rising mist, settled body.
Transparent droplet; or white, black,
grey, brown, red, green. Blue spectrum
distilled to mapmaker’s shorthand.
Rust, revive, clean, corrode, absorb,
reflect, swamp. Torture & relieve.
Drown & purify. Noun & verb.
Ancient source. Broken water
precedes birth. Journey through
moon’s irresistible attraction.
Conserve and store in starred dippers,
pour on earth in fiery stones, pool
under deep earth stone. Bubble up.
There are more water molecules
in a single human body than all
the world’s sand grains: wet and dry.
An evaporated river
in Afghanistan reappears
on cheeks of scorned lovers.
A single drop of H2O
streaming in my body’s water
once ran through the veins of poet Li Po.
Following a career as a U.S. Army musician, Gordon Kippola earned an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Tampa, and calls Bremerton, Washington home. His poetry has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Post Road Magazine, District Lit, The Road Not Taken, The Main Street Rag, Young Ravens Literary Review, Southeast Missouri State University Press, and other splendid publications. One of his poems was selected for the World Enough Writers Coffee Poems Anthology, one was a 2020 Rattle Poetry Prize finalist.
An alien browses the canned food aisles
at Walmart, that one near the hospital.
When the alien is feeling hungry
to be known, it paces hospital halls
instead. When humans die, just as they pass,
their vision can expand to see a ghost,
a wider spectrum of the colors green,
love and orange, or a small visitor
who comes to say: We’re not alone. Hello.
Poet Understanding Water
Agua, vand, wasser, ujë, su,
vesi, eau, amanzi, biyah:
all water; but not all waters.
Steam, ice, salt wave, demarcation,
rain’s salvation, land-erasing
flood, rising mist, settled body.
Transparent droplet; or white, black,
grey, brown, red, green. Blue spectrum
distilled to mapmaker’s shorthand.
Rust, revive, clean, corrode, absorb,
reflect, swamp. Torture & relieve.
Drown & purify. Noun & verb.
Ancient source. Broken water
precedes birth. Journey through
moon’s irresistible attraction.
Conserve and store in starred dippers,
pour on earth in fiery stones, pool
under deep earth stone. Bubble up.
There are more water molecules
in a single human body than all
the world’s sand grains: wet and dry.
An evaporated river
in Afghanistan reappears
on cheeks of scorned lovers.
A single drop of H2O
streaming in my body’s water
once ran through the veins of poet Li Po.
Following a career as a U.S. Army musician, Gordon Kippola earned an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Tampa, and calls Bremerton, Washington home. His poetry has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Post Road Magazine, District Lit, The Road Not Taken, The Main Street Rag, Young Ravens Literary Review, Southeast Missouri State University Press, and other splendid publications. One of his poems was selected for the World Enough Writers Coffee Poems Anthology, one was a 2020 Rattle Poetry Prize finalist.