JEFF KING - POEMS

Jeff King is an electronic technician and aspiring farmer living in the small town of Arab, Alabama. His work has appeared in Vita Brevis Press, Poetry Sanctuary, Three Line Poetry, Poetry Quarterly, and Plum Tree Tavern. 

​Starved

when she recklessly considers
telling her parents
                         
of the nights after dinner when she's
plunged two fingers down her throat


she swallows the words and sits silently
in her place at the table


eating
 ​

Outbreak
​

Huddling in the glimmer of a kerosene lantern
we rode it out, monastery silent,
with three tail-tucked pets orbiting our feet.
Beyond our shelter, the storm, 
demanding headlines,
smote treetops, disfigured neighborhoods
and pilfered fields.
When the chaos was over we ascended,
shouldering the burdensome steel door ajar
to peer into the darkness for signs of damage;
my wife's face as pallid as the gibbous moon
beginning to peek like a bashful child
through the rolling eastbound clouds.

​

Dad didn't say he blamed me
​

when the calf got out
and meandered into the road at the moment
a seventeen-year-old boy topped the hill,
going too fast in his dark blue Mustang
on his way to school.

Dad didn't mention the sounds
of bumper crunching bone, of the abbreviated bellow,
of seven hundred pounds hurtling over a hood
then barreling through a windshield
hind feet first.

Later, after the ambulance had sped away, 
and the calf had been buried, dad uttered 
no words of rebuke as he grabbed 
his tools and a roll of wire from the barn
then headed for the section of sagging fence
he told me to mend three days before.

He simply said,
glaring back from the gate,
"I don't need your help."

​