kara mckeever
Be Gentle
We are rattling around in the crumbling
English country houses of our minds,
counting creaks because we have lost
track of the days.
We are opening closets we have
not noticed in years.
Sipping makeshift cocktails
on the scruffy bit of patio
we cleared from the brambles.
Lightly probing old letters
like shattered decanters
that might yet cut or leave stains.
Learning to recognize the calls of birds
treating our windows like stages.
Writing down jokes for later,
choking on our own hilarity.
Squinting at them the next day.
Having vivid and elaborate dreams.
Surprised to find our bodies
there when we undress.
In the Cities Where We Live Now
We take our mothers
to our favorite clothing stores,
ritzy places with bright lights
and sleek decor, where they
buy themselves basic slacks
in dark colors—we whose
mothers organized church
potlucks, made cakes and Jell-O
for our birthdays, paid for
piano lessons—slacks they
will take out and hem,
remembering their mothers,
who sewed whatever clothes
they owned. We watch them pay
over gleaming black countertops,
the straps on their shapeless
pleather purses wearing out,
hear them tell the designer-decked
cashier that no, they can’t easily
return their purchases because they
live in the middle of nowhere, but
thank you anyway, watch them
rejoin their waiting daughters,
we who wash our cotton blouses
by hand and pick up dry cleaning,
we who walk out
of the house and out of the
store pressed and unsure
of ourselves, we who know
what to buy and where
but not the price.
The Insolence of Thistles
How they dotted our pastures,
fuchsia blossoms like neon wounds,
a scourge on the land we had nurtured.
How like knights of old we slew them
with sharp appendages, hacked
until they lay wrecked around us,
broken-necked and still.
How we chopped the roots, sliced off
the heads, made sure they were dead
and could no longer drink our dirt dry
or send seeds skipping over the hills.
It helped to be angry.
Those spiked blossoms were soft
as sea grass, bright as coral
we would never in our lifetimes see.
Kara McKeever’s work has appeared in Ninth Letter, Cutleaf, the North American Review, the Cimarron Review, and elsewhere. She grew up in the rural Midwest and now lives in Kansas City, where she works as an editor in economics, writes, makes art, and travels as much as she can.