CASEY KILLINGSWORTH - POEMS

Casey Killingsworth has work in The American Journal of Poetry, The Writing Disorder, Two Thirds North, and other journals. His book of poems, A Handbook for Water, was published by Cranberry Press in 1995. As well he has a book on the poetry of Langston Hughes, The Black and Blue Collar Blues (VDM, 2008). Casey has a Master’s degree from Reed College.

Mars
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There was this show on the massive amount of food 
prepared everyday on a luxury ship, thousands
of pounds of shrimp and chicken and unspeakable 
numbers of workers trapped on that boat, 
racing against the clock to make every meal perfect. 
I don’t even know if we have words to judge this.

Sometimes I don’t feel like I belong here, like I’m
different in the way a shrimp is different
from a chicken, the way they look at
the world with either feathers or from 
underneath the ocean and in the end sharing 
space on someone’s plate is all they have in common. 

Sometimes I feel like I’m from another planet,
you know, like I’m lying there on someone else’s plate.
Then I walk down the street watching everyone watch 
themselves in store windows believing the same thing,
how different they are. And I start thinking, well, maybe 
we are all from Mars or maybe we’re already on Mars
and we’ve been here all along. 

And if that’s true, then maybe we’re not so different after all.

Originally published in Tipton Poetry Journal

Natural selection poem 
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Every girl I loved 
in high school or
at least every one
I dreamed about
ended up with 
a boyfriend 
from another school, 
and I hated them 
for that because all
the chances I never
had anyway died again, 
like running over 
a dead animal on
your way home. 
I know now they
were instinctively 
driven to perpetuate, 
to seek out their 
best prospects, 
the shiny athletes or
intellectual student
body presidents so
their own babies would
defend the genome, 
you know, date boys
from other schools. 
I know now it was 
just natural selection
because all of us wished 
we carried that favored 
gene too.


Originally published in Down in the Dirt

My life as money
​

I don’t want you to think I only look at life 
in terms of money but when I go to work on Monday 
I’m a dollar sign, income for somebody else,
how much work can I do in how little time.

I come home and the house measures me
as square footage, the view from the deck
I don’t have, how a second bathroom would help 
the resale value, fix up the yellow lawn, etc.

When I’m in the store I watch people
watch me to see how much
I’m going to spend, to see
how big their bonuses will be.

Even love is money. Once someone
left me to go away to college to get a career
and there I was, holding hocked dreams
and working to make a square living.

I sit in the coffee shop
with a $3 coffee plus tip and wonder if
there’s any other way to count a life
but there is no other way.

Originally published in  vox poetica

Crow spreads his wings
​

This Indian man is instructing us
about the ways of a native dance,
with illustrations and young people
regaled in their finest beaded clothing
and they sing and pound drums
and the dancers move in ways I have
never seen and the music is notes

I have never heard, like the sound 
creek water makes hitting stones under 
a distant crow. The man introduces 
a new dance and he calls the dancer 
by the wrong name and his young 
daughter laughs at him just exactly 
the way my daughter laughs at me. 

A million crows fly over the world
and if we look up we will see a million
silhouettes, each one as different
as Gene Kelly is to these dancers, 
but a daughter’s laugh, that,
that sting of wrath wrapped inside
the music of a child’s delight, I
think that’s the same sound 
no matter what dance you do,
no matter what creek you hear.


Originally published in Galway Review

The names we name our children
​

Charlie is goofy and irreverent but harmless, 
Charles likes fine cloth and doesn’t care that others laugh at him. 
Cheap beer finds Chuck nearly every night and
Carly is fun but laughs too hard at parties. 
Samantha will want to give a speech at graduation, 
Sam runs faster than the boys.
Emily organizes the food on her plate; 
Scott won’t keep any job for long.
Elizabeth hurts to be more popular so she joins a crusade 
to save something, but for the wrong reasons.
Bob will always be the man. 
Someone whose name I do not know will be a lawyer, 
someone else will live on the street. 
Someone named Randall will become the vice president of a huge company 
and someone else named Randall will inexplicably die in his neighbor’s pool.
Gilbert will be a rockstar although he sucks at guitar. 
Joan is a great artist but nobody will  ever know it 
and she wants
to get married,
and she wants 
to have children,
but she never will.

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