Bluetown
/Kimberly Gibson-Tran
after Richard Hugo
Your town was all haze and cow-plow. No cartoons
could break the static, and only skaters in empty silos
held any conversation.
Your dad was a deadbeat, your mama
the saint of puff-gold hair.
How they rocked and rolled up the church stairs.
You hit seventeen hard, squeal and lurch
on gator-leather backseats. You were dying to be
born, those mornings you crawled out,
reeking of charred grass and gasoline,
scratching back, drunk ghost, to the pale road.
Where you stopped, nobody knows.
Author’s Statement: I'm fascinated by poetic influences and apprompted poems. In fact, I wrote my linguistics master's thesis "Lines by Someone Else" about the risks poets take by referencing a text connection with a predecessor. We all come "after" others, and these three poems represent conversations I've had with "Spider Crystal Ascension" by Charles Wright, "The Bear," by Galway Kinnell, and Richard Hugo's classic training manual for young poets: The Triggering Town. I feel so deeply about these works. They keep speaking to me, and I keep trying to answer. I don't mind if my signalling the text connections makes my poems seem less original--that's part of the bargain of declaring an influence. I hope I'm creating a tempting opportunity for the reader to fall in love with them too.
Bio: Kimberly Gibson-Tran has writing appearing or forthcoming in The Bombay Literary Magazine, Passages North, Third Coast, Dunes Review, Reed Magazine, Rowayat, Jelly Squid, Saranac Review, Thin Air Magazine, Saw Palm, and elsewhere. Raised in Thailand, she now lives in Princeton, Texas, and works in college counseling.
