Cheryl Quimba

Baltimore, You Are a Pocket Full of Copper Nails

   

A lot of the time I want to push people

into giant manholes then fly down

to save them, introduce myself as their

long-lost sister who has finally sold everything

to come home. They would be confused but then

so happy for having found something they didn’t know

was lost, and it would feel like a piano playing

beams of colored light against the wall.

In your poems I’m always sad and saying

sad things but in real life I say I am the mountain

sitting on this park bench, so small a microscope needs

binoculars to find me. Baltimore is filled with dirty bathrooms

but no one cares because fun is happening.

Where I live the places where

people die are marked with stuffed animals tied

to lamp posts. There is a store called Hair Strategies

and little kids push strollers filled with

cans of soda up and down the medians.

I like to cross the street like

I’m walking through a casino.

The bells are ringing and ringing

and ringing goodbye.

Cheryl Quimba is a recent graduate of the MFA program in creative writing at Purdue University.  Poems of hers have appeared in Dusie, Phoebe, Tinfish, and 1913.  She lives in Baltimore with no pets and works as a publications assistant at Johns Hopkins University.