Kimberly White

 
Dinah in Her Dirty Tent

I am not the one who calls it dirty
for I am as clean as anything else
in a desert world
and as dirty as everyone else
born female
Locked inside my cloth walls
with the red metal scent
of my blood
the sounds of sandstorms
whipping the tentcloth
in snapping waves
Heat presses down
like a boulder
I lie flat
to save my breath
as the river inside me
refuses to be dammed.
I myself refuse to be damned
by someone else’s book
whose condemnations were drawn
in someone else’s blood
spilled in the dirt by hands of war,
the same hands which lock me
in my dirty red tent.

Reinterpretation of Stolen Scriptures (Psalm 120)

In my distress, I cried in my dark room, where comfort and peace lean on me. Deliver my soul, oh my gods, from the winds of war and hearts of stone. I know them every day, oh my gods, those tongues those minds those souls bathed in hate. Sharp arrows of the weak, with tongues of fire. If I don’t feel sorry for me, neither does god, any god, and I don’t leave myself behind wherever I go. The hatred in my world is well known to me, to all of my kind, yet I know my own peace in the face of their wars. Everyone who hates but also loves knows the same peace.
 

Kimberly White the author of three novels, the latest being Waterfall Girls (CLASH Books, 2021).  Her poetry has appeared in Cream City Review, Does It Have Pockets, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Northern California.

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