THAT WAS HARDER THAN I MEANT
Because you didn’t catch yourself
winding up, winding
back, to hand-deliver the blow,
couldn’t spot the fizzled wick’s
second life inside
you—that sparkable blaze one
breath away—your prankish spanking,
your playful buddy
punch, your swing, was harder
than your imagining: it had
angle, speed, nerve.
It became something no friend
could deserve, your senseless ardor
like some backfiring
machine burning down the block.
Shocked, you played the wiseacre,
although the ache
sounded loudest; as for wisdom,
you spluttered diversions, no whit
sager. Rage’s gears
had their turn, cantankerously cranked—
now, if there’s anything left
to learn, perhaps
it’s that while winding back,
your body composed a perfect
image of what
anger might require, the true
emblem of how erstwhiles accrue:
you needed that
distance between them and you.
Stephen Kampa is the author of four collections of poetry: Cracks in the Invisible (2011), Bachelor Pad (2014), Articulate as Rain (2018), and World Too Loud to Hear (2023). His work has appeared in the Yale Review, Cincinnati Review, Southwest Review, Hopkins Review, Poetry Northwest, Subtropics, and Smartish Pace. He was also included in Best American Poetry 2018 and Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America's Poets Respond to the Pandemic (2020). During the spring of 2021, he was the writer in residence at the Amy Clampitt House. He is currently the poetry editor of Able Muse.