Act Now
I should have been a dolphin,
seems fair.
I should have been a loveseat,
passed from mother to daughter to son
then chopped into kindling
to keep the tinder company as it burns.
Fire where there’s father
and daughter warming hands.
If only I were mittens.
Was I ever happy?
If only I had solved the great riddle of tomorrow:
What creature walks on water in the morning,
sunshine in the afternoon, and eggshells at night?
If only I had long black braids
perhaps the moonless night
would see me as a distant relation.
If only I had said empress
instead of night,
but maybe I’d regret it.
I shouldn’t name my regrets
Drusilla or Messalina.
If only I understood loss as simply loss
and not canonization.
But I pulled golden vestments over my head.
How could I have known?
Had I only discovered electricity,
I may have been less lonely.
If only I had loved.
But you can’t take that with you.
I should have believed in evolution.
If only I had fins
I would have dived deep beneath waves
when the flood roared in to claim me.
~
Gold Spikes on a Black Night
There is no shame. There is, however,
the smell of gunpowder and gasoline.
The shade of linen smudged with coal dust,
a rock dove, sturdy on a razor wire,
smug in its sturdiness—
centering its gravity, wings sometimes
exploding its body,
as if to remind us it can fly,
then correcting itself,
making its body compact again, not small.
It is easy to imagine leaves, river, mountains,
and moonlight as a single dark distance,
far but closing in.
The clouds, cumulonimbus, dark,
assembling above us,
arms crossed, heads shaking in disgust.
~
Cindy King is the author of a book-length poetry collection, Zoonotic (2022), and two chapbooks, Easy Street (2021) and Lesser Birds of Paradise (2022). Her latest poetry manuscript won the C&R Poetry Book Award and will be published in 2025. Her chapbook will be released by Galileo Press in 2025. Cindy’s work appears in Threepenny Review, The Sun, New England, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. You can hear her online on American Weekend, a production of National Public Radio, at weekendamerica.publicradio.org, rhinopoetry.org, and at cortlandreview.com. Her work has also been chosen by former Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith to appear on NPR’s The Slowdown, and she recently served as a featured Festival Poet at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. Cindy has been awarded fellowships and scholarships by Tin House, the Sewanee Writers’ Workshop, the Fine Arts Work Center, Colgate University, and other organizations. She was born in Cleveland, Ohio and grew up swimming in the shadows of the hyperboloid cooling towers on the shores of Lake Erie. She currently lives in Utah, where she is a professor of creative writing at Utah Tech University and faculty advisor to Route 7 Review and The Southern Quill. She also enjoys serving as an editorial associate at Seneca Review and TriQuarterly.