November 28 @ 6 PM, at MOTR Pub 1345 Main Street

Feature-Open Reading

Proof of  vax or negative test 72 hours prior to the event required for entrance

Featuring Kamal Kimball
(Columbus)

 

KAMAL KIMBALL Kimball is a Pushcart-nominated poet currently living in central Ohio. On the editorial team for Muzzle Magazine, her work has been published or is forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Sweet: A Literary Confection, New South, Salamander, JuxtaProse, Juked, Rattle, Phoebe, Tahoma Literary Review, Hobart, Sundog Lit, Bone Parade, Kaaterskill Basin Literary Journal, Forklift Ohio, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, The Mouth That Sucks the Bone, is forthcoming from Pitymilk Press in 2021.
She has served as a guest judge for Writers Digest and taught poetry classes at OSU, University of Cincinnati, Chase Public, and in a variety of community settings. She is a member of the Ohio Poetry Association and completed her MFA in Poetry at The Ohio State University in 2021. She works in Communications at a local food pantry and continues to teach English coursework at the college level.

Contact her via e-mail at kekimba@gmail.com. Follow her on Twitter @kamalkimball and on IG at kamal_e_kimball

Word of Mouth was founded in 2014 by poets Mark Flanigan and Jim Palmarini, inspired by the late poet and  co-conspirator Aralee Strange. Word of Mouth asks poets of all persuasion to show up, mouth off, and listen
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SuckleWhen I was a child, scouting my tiny desire,
I peered through the windows, the longings 
of others. I knew that I would jaw some open, 
knew that I would someday spread to the limits 
set by skin. My hands knew what they wanted 
before I knew the weight of want. 
Then I knew throb, the struggle 
of unbordered night, eagerness that fogs. 
Desire pearled in on me, beaded, feathered. 
I practiced desire, gave her a name 
and forgot it. Grew pale-faced as the stars
that I would soon reject as shining aberrations. 
Later, I listened at other windows 
more and more and more for the beating 
of something urgent, wing-like. I desired
permanence but just got off instead
growling into the dusk with mistakes of flesh.
I strained against the limits. I understood 
little of the wild growing glutton heart, wrecking 
along and catching, sometimes, an acceptable light. 
I have desired the kiss of everyone, thirsted 
to trap forever, to merge into gunpowder mist. 
I have been alone since I can remember, since before 
I bulleted from the other into the body made. 
I’ve desired only what can’t be had. What I have 
is my hunger. I have it, it’s mine. I have 
stumbling, begging for a mouth to make me.