KIMBERLY WHITE / 2 POEMS INSPIRED BY LAW AND ORDER
The Kids Who Think It’s Fun to Drink and Carry On with the Dead
Inspired by Law and Order: Criminal Intent, episode #53
Because the dead don’t judge, the dead don’t tell. Because the dead are anonymous, each gravestone a blank screen which will never fill with more than alcohol can hold. Because the names of the dead don’t want to be learned, the dead don’t hold their names as tight as we do. Because the buried dead are happy to stand in for all that we wish were dead and buried, happy to remind us that all things must pass. Because boneyard maps can’t be read in the dark, because the dead don’t walk the same roads. Because the ménage à trois of alcohol, death, and mystery can’t be overdrank, overkilled, or overexplored. Because to carry on with the dead must necessarily be done without them, despite the presence of their bones and their stones, invitations are not automatically accepted and the names of the dead with whom we do carry on might not match the names on the stones. Because jealousy and hierarchy are as useful to the dead as their discarded bones, they don’t care whose drunken feet dance on their graves and they are not waiting to dance on ours. Because we think the spent lives of the dead are ours to mine for that which we can adopt as our own, because we define inheritance as material rather than ethereal when even ethereal can’t be defined. Because the dead know what killed them and we envy that, the dead have seen the faces of their gods and we crave their sight. Because in order to face what we fear, we believe we must get drunk with it. Because when we’re kids, death is a drug and a delusion, and we are too easily intoxicated and too invested in our own madness for anyone’s good.
The Woman Who Knew Creative People
Inspired by Law and Order: Criminal Intent, episode #158
They gave her the beauty she lacked. It wasn’t beauty she lacked, but the right ways to see it, the right places to find it, the right arms to embrace it. They gave her a template she is afraid to abandon, afraid to unravel too much of what they wove into her, afraid the remaining fabric will be too sheer. They gave her a hole she will never fill without their help, these creative people, a hole ripped wide before she was born into constrained privilege, a hole which bleeds in colors beyond any palette. She gave them a mirror to reflect their own light through the prism of her adoration, a mirror to catch the overflow of their egos, launder and return it to them in splendid folds, a mirror which does not crack. They handed her images of muses made from scraps of myth with her hair and eyes, images laced with Pan pipes and waterfalls and beautiful beasts, images mined from her own dreams and returned to her with their own high hopes. She offered bare fertile ground and they planted seeds she could not grow, she offered honey and they drained the pot, she offered a temple to gods she didn’t know and they barred her from their mysteries. She walked a seeker’s path without armor, used borrowed maps drawn by strangers, embraced a dreamer’s vision with intent to make it her own and when this vision refused her, she patched it up with her own palette. Weaker colors struggle and clash and stretch to fill the holes opened by the creativity of others, but they are bottomless and quick to reject, preferring to remain empty rather than be filled by her. But she knew them, these creative people, and that belongs to her. The knots of their touch will never be undone.
Kimberly White’s latest novel is Waterfall Girls (CLASH Books, 2021). Her poetry has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Cream City Review, The CRANK, and other journals and anthologies. She is the author of four chapbooks, Penelope, A Reachable Tibet, The Daily Diaries of Death, and Letters to a Dead Man; as well as two other novels, Bandy’s Restola and Hotel Tarantula. She also dabbles in other arts, and spends most of her time in Northern California with her pens and papers and massive collection of Tarot decks.