These Kids

Khaty Xiong’s “On Teaching My Son How to Mourn” brims with games: a young boy slams his mother’s palm with his fist, imagining his hand is a “butterfly coming home.” He races through the garden, waiting for his mother to catch him. She feigns falling into a pit. In her own mind, however, the pit “was a grave”: her complicated game of pretend involves telling herself one fiction, and her son another. Yet how fictional is her collapse? Suffering from grief, she is sinking into a pit of sorts; in another scene, her face is “wet from so much crying.”

After his mother slumps on the ground, the boy runs over and—in a gesture familiar from the butterfly game—takes first one of her hands, then the other. Even as he waits for her to catch him, he catches her.

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In “The Gentle Art of Shabby Dressing,” Spencer Short praises “threadbare threads”—but warns that not everyone approaches this fashion with equal skill. “Done poorly,” he writes, it resembles "an unread bookshelf // of secondhand prose: a too-studied pose,” neither genuine nor convincing. True masters of the style, however, reveal “the intricate pattern in the years’ / inexorable ravel.”

Short describes this phenomenon in a sonnet, an intricately patterned form. He hints that, if unsuccessful imitators “pose” in “prose,” then the successful ones work in poetry. Perhaps it’s the work of poets, not just shabby dressers, to show “time’s work.”

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In “Across the Street,” a mother fails to return home from her morning walk, prompting her son to go out on his own. “I ran across the street, I didn’t know any better,” Austin Segrest writes. "Ran out in the street, I didn’t know no better. / I just knew a woman was there, though I’d never met her.”

Segrest’s tercets follow an AAB sequence: the first two lines of each stanza closely resemble each other, and the third line, though different, rhymes (or nearly rhymes) with the first two. That pattern, as well as the poem’s tone of lament, recalls the blues—a musical form that Langston Hughes, among many others, adapted into poetry. The repetition of the first two lines mirrors the monotony of the wait at the neighbor’s, and the frequent imperfect rhymes (“trinkets” and “think it,” “water” and “another”) reflect the situation’s failure to resolve. Indeed, Segrest never explains how the experience ends: he keeps the reader in the same state of suspense that the poem describes.

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In “These kids running through pictures,” Jane Zwart both scolds and celebrates “the kids who wreck, // who make” a photograph by rushing unexpectedly into the frame. The near-rhyme of “wreck” and “make” suggests the kinship of the concepts, reflecting how—for these spirited children—one act implies the other.

Such kids may be peripheral to photographers’ intents, but they play central roles in the finished products. To Zwart’s product, too; her title lends them pride of place, and accordingly, she situates the word “kids” halfway through the poem, in the middle of the line. Indeed, the children “make” Zwart’s poem: without them, she would have no subject.