THE WISHBONE GALAXY
Washington Writers' Publishing House, 1994

Read sample poems

Out of Print

"This promising first book offers an eccentric commentary on love, sex and family. Roberts has a dexterous poetic voice, one that either tells a story or, better yet, disappears behind the story, allowing you to enter it. Roberts also has a keen ability to spot the perfect metaphor...Roberts lets her cadenced poetic voice carry the poem, allowing it to find its own language and story line. These poems comprise the lucky side of the wishbone."
—Publishers' Weekly, June 1994

"This uncommonly original and spirited book of poems is as bountiful as the universe itself. It is divided into three diverse sections, each of which bristles with a kind of glorious energy...There is a delightfully subversive list quality to the poems "Imagine This" and "Darwin in Reverse," like layers being delicately but deliberately peeled away. The mother in "Mother" is a female horseshoe crab and a sharp metaphor at that. While the daughter in "Daughter" comes face to face with the real father who failed her and the dream father she created on the page...All in all, this book is an astronomical debut. Next time you look up at the stars, the one shining brightest might be a poet named Kim Roberts."
—Letter Ex: Chicago's Poetry Newsmagazine, Gregg Shapiro, December 1994

"The Wishbone Galaxy is one of the best first books in my lifetime. I admire these poems' tenacious tactile qualities, their skillfully concealed craft, their density and intensity. Moving, passionate, insightful, these wonderful evocations of Eros should be appreciated by anyone interested — and who isn’t — in “the pressure of one body against another. These brilliant poems offer a constellation of pleasures."
—Bill Knott

Excerpts from The Wishbone Galaxy by Kim Roberts

HOW TO IMAGINE DEAFNESS

Darken your ears until the tunnels
with their intricate clockwork
are sheathed in pitchy calm.
Hum a little blue, to yourself,

but keep it secret. The small bones
will dip delicately, like willow leaves
that merely brush the water's surface,
in their repose. The small hairs

will lie down together like tentacles.
Listen: the lake stops its lapping
repeptition of sibilance
(physicist, Sisyphus, sassafras)

and the great snail unfurls itself,
stretches its tongue longingly
toward the distant echo surge
that must be the heart.

THE PLASTIC CUP

So it's one of those bars, see,
where everything is painted black:
the walls, the windows, the crowd,
and the music itself, banging
loud and black. We're all drinking
beer from these clear plastic cups,
they don't trust us with glass
and the band's tuneless and it's too loud
to speak, though what is there to say?
The scene, the people, everything's
clouded, and the music everyone
keeps thinking they might come to like.
We could be anywhere,
Detroit or Houston, with these
spotlights shining their circles
randomly on our heads, until this girl,
she puts her empty cup down
right in the middle of a circle
and it glows, it glows like God
right there on the floor.
And it's got you, the kind of light
you wish could blaze inside you, solid
enough to hurt. It's got you.
You're sure it's not just the booze,
and that cup is not a cup. It's larger.
Its light could locate you, stop
the banging, could change, could slow,
you're sure, you don't know how, the thing
that makes your standing still here
a flight.

from "The Constellation Frigidaire"
XIII.
UNDER THE NIGHT SKY

Lying out under the night sky
in October, until even my teeth
were cold, and you oblivious
to all save those clusters of stars

moving slowly on their great wheel
and singing in contrapuntal harmony,
if we were clever enough to hear,
to the melody of the planets.

Teeth can't feel cold, you said,
naming each new cluster.
Richard Nixon, you said, and pointed
until I could see: the broad

forehead, the ski slope nose.
1958 Cadillac, with fins.
The constellation Frigidaire.
I pulled closer for warmth

but you weren't giving any away.
You loved instead the feel
of the words as they formed
in your mouth, fisted words,

words taut as wire. I stopped
hearing and after a while the stars
stopped forming high-rise apartments,
actresses, the shape of Tennessee,

and became just teeth, not
sensitive the way I knew them,
but teeth as you had described:
inert stones in the mouth.