The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Sally Rosen Kindred's "Book of Asters"

My Son Asks

about Pakistan, my son asks
about microprocessors
and sex, he asks about Peter Pan
and cease fires and hard ships
that shark the Atlantic and when
we will stop loving
each other and whether
the cats know their names. My son
asks me for the time,
the past perfect which I can’t find
in my pocketbook, the stick of gum
his grandmother gave him
before she entered the ground upstate
in sudden June, the joke she drank
the last night he saw her, stem
of her glass clear, her arms
wanting his body’s goodbye
and his body turning away.
He asks about Satan, the wrong end
of the movie, if spinach
for dinner then what
for dessert. He crawls into
my bed at six thirty
with gauze and a newspaper. He wants me
to bury the lead. He wants the cats
to live forever but
stop running for good
down morning halls. He wants eggs,
juice and eggs and he will never
stop asking:
even when his plate is white
with grief and galactic heat
he’ll be calling
me from the lobby
in his gray suit to ask
if volcanoes were furry and closed their eyes
before they were born
and I will say yes, yes,
and other lies the dead tell.

This selection comes from Sally Rosen Kindred’s book Book of Asters, available from Mayapple Press. Purchase your copy here!

Sally Rosen Kindred is the author of No Eden (2011) and Book of Asters (2014), poetry books from Mayapple Press, and the chapbook Darling Hands, Darling Tongue (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2013). She has received two poetry awards from the Maryland State Arts Council, and her poems have appeared in Blackbird, Best New Poets 2009, Quarterly West, and on Verse Daily. For more information, please go to http://www.sallyrosenkindred.com/.

Donna Vorreyer is the author of A House of Many Windows (Sundress Publications, 2013) as well as six chapbooks, most recently Encantado, a collaboration with artist Matt Kish from Redbird Chapbooks forthcoming in April. She is an assistant poetry editor for Extract(s), and her second collection is forthcoming from Sundress Publications in 2016.