The Land of K

 There is a K inside you.It is the land of K. K public housing. K public classrooms. K privatized incarcerations. K birds the cuckoo, every kind of cuckoo calling cuckoo cuckoo cuckoo, and the yellowhammer wood peck peck peck pecker.K is a folk fiction, you proclaim, and I too like to think of the crisp white caps of K covered by watery acres, rock thick as the Lincoln monument sunk as killock, case closed. Yet, K continents cleave together cleave adrift, excitements commence increase collapse extinct, new cloisters configure crescents circle, tides roll kshhhh kshhhh kshhhh.Everyday, in the land of K, the schoolbus quits the kids back from killjoy, they cross the crosswalk blinkers click door click octagon light smacks back click, skilled as caught daylight, a kid carries on clips along skip skip skip.He skitters across to become a skit in the K park. Kid his own K his kingdom of kidcraft and kicks. Look! Okay? Cop on, he’s a-okay? Ok, no questions, he’s got a jacket, in his pockets the candy caught holding the whole kit-and-kaboodle, right here on MLK! Before any can counter or quarrel, the K dream inside you is taking effects. That K is like gold, pure gold. ____Heidi Lynn Staples' debut collection, Guess Can Gallop, was selected by Brenda Hillman as a winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize. She is author of three other collections, including A**A*A*A, forthcoming from Ahsahta, and her writing has appeared widely. With the poet Amy King, she co-edited Poets for Living Waters, an international poetry response to the BP Oil Disaster; and Big Energy Poets: When Ecopoetry Thinks Climate Change, recently released from BlazeVOX. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.