Kathleen Flenniken

SOTTO VOCE
Tonight blame Kiri Te Kanawa
infusing the kitchen with her aria,
blame the mixed bouquet of basil

and flayed tomatoes and onions
and one expansive high note blooming
like a rose in fast-frame.

Here in the audience,
even in middle age, a little voice sings
from the back of the auditorium

of my throat. Aren’t all of us
waiting to be discovered?
Men and women enter the grand halls

of regional sales meetings
pressing nametags to dresses and ties.
I have been one of those

entering hopefully, conducting
delicate exchanges in hotel rooms.
I have called those pale disclosures

my life. Blame the cheap seats
we bought in the balcony.
We barely hear the little cogs

in our own hearts. Mozart, they say,
heard entire operas in a moment—
second violins, a glaze of harp,

heroic voices in the chorus all
clamoring to be realized
at once. My genius may be small,

but sometimes truth rolls right at me
like a hard head of cabbage
and I see myself that suddenly,

draining the pasta.
--from FAMOUS, University of Nebraska Press, 2006

IT’S NOT YOU, IT’S ME
Nature abhors a vacuum
but God loves a good vacuuming.

The garden was strewn with petals
and those whimsical helicopter seeds
so God created woman and watched
as Eve unwound the cord, plugged it
into the slot between good and evil
and tidied the footpaths
while all the animals sat there, dumb,
and when she was done

somebody got out the apple juice and spilled
somebody opened a box of crackers
somebody trimmed his nails without a thought
for collecting them in his palm

and after however many days of consecutive Eden
Eve said I gotta get outta here and she did
and the cord snaked after her.
--from FAMOUS, University of Nebraska Press, 2006

RICHLAND DOCK, 2006
The Columbia rolls on
through the desert,
unimpressed and unattached—
a woman who doesn’t need boys
to dance, a king’s parade
of golden carriages,
an endless line of warriors ants.
The river speaks French
in a land of inferior grammar.
The river is blue in a field of brown,
green in a field of grey,
black in a field of bronze.
The river shuns the desert.
It holds its tongue.
It saves itself for the ocean.
The river is fast, undammed,
Rapunzel’s hair let down
and won’t allow this
shrub-steppe plain to climb it.
The river won’t lend itself
to grow a tree. Look—
sagebrush flush with its banks.
No meeting, no kiss, no marriage.
Look at the tumbleweeds.
The river bathes in its glory,
the desert eats dust. The river
belongs to somewhere else.
The mighty river passes, not touching.
But not untouched.

--Southern Poetry Review 45:1

Southern Poetry Review 45:1