Hilary King
Originally from the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia, Hilary King is a poet now living in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, TAB, Salamander, Belletrist, Fourth River, and other publications. Her book Stitched on Me was published by Riot in Your Throat Press in 2024. She loves hiking, travel, and ribbon.
Do Not Consider the Persimmon in Winter
Tell me instead how you endured summer.
Late summer, not the sexy fresh fourth
of tomorrow, but infernal August of right now
when it’s too damned hot and you can’t
breathe, little green hands all over your face,
birds homebuilding on your shoulders.
A child climbs your heart, then a dog pisses on it.
Your heart is too tall, sways.
This a season no one sings about, no one
memorializes in ornaments or flavored coffees.
Close your sap-filled eyes, remember
sky lies beyond crown. Hold
your branches open. You are at your work.
You are turning flowers into fruit.
My Favorite Podcast Lately
Is the grass recapping yesterday’s orange and yellow sunrise.
Is the house telling its story in shifts and creaks and squeaks.
The full moon takes listener questions. Is shame weightless in space, I ask.
Filling my ear canal keeps me from drowning. Hope a small boat, sound and noise its oars.
I record the argument between my hunger and my mirror. The boat tips.
In the ear there are canals, drums, bony labyrinths. Song lyrics that come back to you
thirty years later? The ear is a haunted house.
Comments my mother made about my body are pressed in vinyl. Late nights I put on gloves,
slip the records from their dusty covers, and dance to the scratches.
I can’t remember my grandmother’s voice. Her pitch was high and her aim was
my mother.
