Keetje Kuipers

POLISHED ROUGH

After all these years together, I know
your childhood well enough—that simple house
on its grass-rimmed cul-de-sac—and can say
it’s more than likely your mother never
took you along with her to the liquor store.
So you wouldn’t have learned the almost
pleasure of being pushed down the dim
aisle in a miniature cart, the heady smell
of cardboard boxes holding every drink
that hadn’t yet been drunk, the wooden
counter and the man who used to reach
across its scuffed expanse to hand me
a candy: the flavor medicinal, the shape
and heft of pocket lozenges, the color like
a green beer bottle broken on the beach
and each piece polished rough by the ocean’s
sand and stones. I’ve never seen them
anywhere else. But I remember the way I wanted
that hard little candy between my teeth,
not for what it was but for what it was
supposed to be: the promise of a sweetness
I knew it could never contain. And that’s me.
That’s my love. Not the kind you’d ever choose,
but one you’ve had to decide to want,
a piece of glass you wait so patiently to chew on.

KEETJE KUIPERS is the author, most recently, of All Its Charms, which includes poems featured in The Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. Her writing has appeared in American Poetry Review, The New York Times Magazine, and Poetry. She has been a Stegner Fellow, Bread Loaf Fellow, and the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident. She lives with her wife and children in Montana, where she is Editor of Poetry Northwest. Her fourth book will be Lonely Women Make Good Lovers (BOA, 2025).