‘Pillow Dates’, ‘Sidewalk Stamping’ & ‘Yellowed Head’

Janice Kim is a Korean-American writer living in NYC. She takes photos regularly as a practice to keep appreciating the innumerable details every day that otherwise might go unnoticed. She believes that it is all about how you see.

Pillow Dates

Point and laugh, which I deserve.
I depended on my fantasies,
never realizing they could
slip or stride away at will.
Missing misty mistresses
long and frequently visited
at twilight or pre-sleep and
they performed to my script.
I cannot, even in fantasy,
couple with potentialities.
In self-guided pillow visions,
teasing shadows blow away.
Once, always in sight and touch,
love and lust objects are gone.
When intimacies might be fatal
even thoughts scream, “Peril!”
When tipsy, tired or loose, I
directed tiny thrills to play.
Now I cannot override the real
to command performance.
Love and lust become impossible.
Dreamed-of liaisons fade to sheer.
Could-be flings leap quickly
months, perhaps years, away.
The simple-minded joys
of pretend cannot survive plagues.
Where can the joy be if we never
know the next possible when.

Sidewalk Stamping

Pre-dawn in Woodbourne,
a suburb lush of tree and bush
tucked in the crotch on the inner city.
Two of us stand apposed, mom
skunk and I, the armed and the big,
with no intent to go at the other.
Under sodium-vapor streetlight,
my skin was wan Talbots green.
Mom toddled and waddled ahead
of her string of Steiff-worthy kits.
All were fuzzy, two thin white stripes
on each black ball body. Hers was
big as a grapefruit, her offsprings’
the size and shape of apricots.
Often she and I had eyed each other
early as we passed 40 feet apart.
She led her necklace of babies
through my backyard, then
my front yard, and finally crossed
the street as every morning they
shopped for breakfast foods.
That day though, she was bow-legged
at my front gate, caring little that
my car was beyond her raised tail.
Vectors and solid geometry
seemed not to be her forte.
She stamped each front paw in turn
as a warning. We shared a stare.
What devilment dared my stand?
I channeled the striped mom, stamping
(while remembering tomato-juice
baths I rubbed into our howling
Maine coon cat to de-skunk him).
Perhaps it was the dark and quiet,
my relative size or our familiarity.
She went still, then waddled South,
passing, and not gassing, me.
Fortune can in fact favor the bold.

Yellowed Head

McCarthy came with the house,
He long roomed as other seamen.
Dad gave Johnny the townhouse
only if McCarthy could stay put.
Now he walks with two canes.
His days mean sitting in his one room
on the shabby North slope of Beacon Hill.
On the second floor over Hancock Street,
McCarthy smokes cigarettes, often
with a friend who smokes cigarettes.
The never grand, well-past-old house
is deep into its third century
with white door frames inside,
all except to McCarthy’s room.
Nicotine and tars seep and curl around
that door header all the day and night,
painting the once-white a light gold.
Har, golden from Old Gold smoke.
His friend brings cans and airy loaves
and, of course, he brings Old Golds.
McCarthy leaves his room twice a year
— not for Mass (and he has no family).
Rather on St. Patrick’ Day he takes drink.
He climbs a stool for two stouts at The Red
Hat.
Then again he hobbles out on Election Day
— a vote for some Irishman he knows or
knows of.

Michael Ball scrambled from daily and weekly papers through business and technical pubs. Born in OK and raised in rural WV and SC, he became more citified in Manhattan and Boston. As one of the Hyde Park Poets, he has moderate success placing poems in numerous online and print journals and anthologies, and being a feature at several arts centers. HeartLink published his Leaving the Party chapbook in 2024.