"poem" broadside #294: Incidental Kill, by Monica Kidd

Friend, I've been thinking about that day on Temperance Street, before you packed up, before any of it, when Ken sat at your table to eat whale. All dark glasses and skinny elbows, drunk on the place. His homecoming. A Fogo Island minke, caught by someone's father, was the story. Wrong time, wrong place: how she goes. Mason jars marked with a letter and passed from kettle to coat pocket. How he grinned. The meaty greasy on his plate, the fork in his ham-fist. He wanted a picture and I took one. His serious stare. His joy bursting.

We all climbed Topsail Bluff later and I still look for myself in his poem. And still I find: your hand, his cigarette, even my faded red truck. Wrong place, wrong time. Incidentally, did you ever tell him the W on that jar was really an M? Someone's bottled moose forgotten in your bachelor fridge? How that piece of lead shot stuck in your teeth like a little white lie?


Incidental Kill
by Monica Kidd
above/ground press broadside #294

Monica Kidd is the author of four books, including Actualities (poetry from Gaspereau Press, 2007). A former biologist and journalist, she lives and writes in St. John's, Newfoundland, where she now works as a physician.