Kimberly Grey is the author of The Opposite of Light (Persea Books, 2016), winner of the 2015 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize. Her work has appeared in Tin House, A Public Space, Kenyon Review, Boston Review, and other journals. She is the recipient of a fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Umbria, Italy and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, where she recently taught as a lecturer in creative writing. She lives in Menlo Park, California.
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Love in the Time of Trump
We need a form to form us, we need a form to teach
us the facts. How, actually, it is form that un-renders us
now: my back against your back.
This is experimental. We need a form to re-form us.
Your face and my face are just shapes, cracked
and stacked like blue cubes,
like two single wounds. What is time, I mean, what
is time? Are we, in order to be kept, too keeping?
Is love really a mountain
that just stops? When I say, why aren’t you weeping
I mean, weep with me. We need an affectionate form,
we need a home various
with love. This is experimental. Everything is sad
but I cannot describe the sad. I can only describe
the outside of sadness
which is like a slug and too soft to touch or take.
Are we alright in each other and is form just a question
of what we can’t make?
We need a form that informs us. Everything is
wrecked, our house is wrecking, we have stumbled
out of, wherefrom, near to
and hence – even language has become unbearable,
love; our once I can’t live without you, now
our dear, why won’t you be my panic?
