Two Sonnets, Poems, Kimberly Ann Southwick.

YOUR BIRTHDAY WAS LAST MONTH: A SONNET

after Bernadette Mayer’s “Birthday Sonnet for Grace”

Bamboo & lace, her highness hugging about the rounded trunk of a tree

I need to surmise a summer when spring is still here

The smaller spaces of lines & words like flowers blooming

Just a modest garden, a compost, nothing worthy of a queen

How you have your father’s hair

How it only parts wildly,

Like a nest of whole birds—branches, brambles,

Sticks you like to feed the dogs.

So much younger than the trees, I am almost forty

And working finally a job with salary, benefits

Where there seems so little time for collage, poetry

We were in the barn & you played & then said, “outside?”

How could I resist, how could I say no, the spring weather perfect no mosquitos

& my answer always yes, I love you, yes yes, yes

DELICIOUS AMERICAN POEM SONNET FOR 21ST CENTURY LATE CAPITALISM 

after Bernadette Mayer’s “Incandescent War Poem Sonnet”

When we’re almost all out of ice cream, America 

buys more, slops it atop an Oreo cookie, double stuf 

of course, & sugar snow down the mouth hole 

then smash, smash, smash, smash, crunch. He likes 

the way Oreo sounds, how many syllables it takes up 

even though it’s just four letters. Once, 

at a Barnes & Noble, I saw a sign for an Oreo 

Dessert Bar, featuring “hand-crushed Oreos” 

& I shuddered & even though I wanted the Oreo 

Dessert Bar, I got a cookie instead. No one’s hands 

should have to crush Oreos in the 21st century 

when we have machines who can do that for us. Take that, 

capitalism. (The cookie was less expensive.) I want to be  

Poet Laureate of Oreos, but they never reply to my tweets. 

Kimberly Ann Southwick is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and English at Jacksonville State University. Her debut full-length poetry collection, Orchid Alpha, was published by Trembling Pillow Press in 2023. Kimberly is the founder and Editor in Chief of the literary-arts journal Gigantic Sequins. Find her on social media via the handle @kimannjosouth or visit kimberlyannsouthwick.com for more.