Issue 29: Kimberly Campanello

Past Tense

Another continent is found, which brings us to eight now.

We long for one walkable stretch, to reach one another.

The abandoned yacht has sunk further into the muck

of the once-Viking, once-Roman, once-

Brythonic, once once once once once once once once

once nonriver ghostly forest

once nonhuman nonlanguage ooze

once nonwhole inversion

of anything we might have ever known,

present-day river Ouse.

The abandoned yacht has sunk, or the water

has risen, rolling down from the ‘wild’ moors,

a wholly invented landscape, mind you,

dreamed up in smoke and mud.

Why do our maps mark forests that aren’t there?

The GIF in response depicts a long-haired child,

eating a peeled onion, raw and whole.

It’s understandable, you know, our quickness

to judgement, our minute calibration

of the possible, our settling for, our settling in,

the rack we made to hold our knives, and our resolve

to sweat the onion slowly, to bring its layers together

and let the flavours right down, sinking into sweet alchemy

down, down, down, down into heat

back to when our hands were wholly fused

to each other, ready to spark,

which was not all that long ago

but also unfathomably past

tense so I’m not sure what conditional phrase

to set up and how to get it running

on my tongue and

out from my mouth

and still breathe in

[Kimberly Campanello's most recent projects are MOTHERBABYHOME, a 796-page poetry-object and reader’s edition book (2019), and sorry that you were not moved (2022), an interactive digital poetry publication produced in collaboration with Christodoulos Makris and Fallow Media. She is a Markievicz Award co-recipient and has been awarded residencies at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris, The Studios of Key West, and RAMDOM in Italy. She is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Leeds.]

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