Scott Kenimond
Virginia Woolf Goes to Ikea
I had meant only to buy a bookshelf, and yet the thing
expanded around me, as certain places do, until it
seemed I had entered not a store but a method of
thinking. The arrows directed me onward with an
authority I found both comforting and faintly absurd,
and I followed them through kitchens already inhabited
by invisible breakfasts, through bedrooms in which no
one had slept and yet which appeared to remember
sleep. Everywhere there were objects waiting for
attachment: lamps waiting to illuminate a reader, tables
waiting to collect letters, bowls waiting to receive fruit.
I found myself wondering whether we choose these
things or whether they choose us, arranging themselves
quietly in the background of our lives until one day we
mistake them for necessity. A woman examined curtains
with great seriousness. A child disappeared behind a
tower of flat-packed boxes. Somewhere above us a
voice made an announcement that dissolved before I
could understand it. And all the while I drifted onward
beneath the white lights, thinking how strange it was
that so much effort should be devoted to the
construction of domestic happiness, as though
happiness might be assembled from diagrams and small
metal screws. Yet I could not entirely resist it. There was s
omething moving in the sight of these unfinished
rooms, these provisional lives displayed so confidently
before us. By the time I reached the warehouse, where
shelves rose in orderly ranks toward the ceiling, I had
forgotten the bookshelf altogether and was occupied
instead by the curious sensation that I had been
wandering through the visible architecture of other
people's expectations, carrying my own among them.
~
Cold Section of Myself
The ceiling fan keeps mispronouncing my name as a
bowl of peaches sweat through the windowsill. I keep
waiting for a sentence with enough gravity to ruin my
life in the right direction. Something of quality with
antlers made of lightning. Something that climbs out of
a notebook dragging my career through a flooded
parking lot. My friends are here. Their voices gather in
the room like folded maps. I touch the edge of every
laugh and still end up standing in the cold section of
myself. The jukebox is full of wet leaves and I am really
fucking horny. The new moon knows this already,
watching me mistake a weathervane for prophecy. Will
I ever meet someone to date? Not that random bodies
aren’t beautiful — it just gets tiring carrying home
another constellation that forgets my name by morning.
I want to write a poem called splooge. The title arrived
first like a shopping cart rolling across a field. Maybe
this is it? Dirty words excite me. I hide them in coat
pockets. I tuck them beneath receipts in a shoebox
where I keep old leather. I stare at people’s footwear.
Shoes know things like departure times carrying entire
biographies as feet turn to walk away afterwards.
Afterwards feels like a deer standing in a pharmacy
waiting on Xanax. That man’s pants are very high, or
the river is very shallow. He is sexy as fuck. I need to
stop thinking with my dick. The church bell falls into a
puddle dripping from the motel ice machine — singing
little silver songs so tiring. I wish he would text me
back. Inside, his silence hangs in the air like a ladder to
nowhere. Outside, the evening folds itself into smaller
evenings and the peaches have gone bruised. I want
people to come hang out with me more often. I want a
porch light bright enough for returning. I want a room
that keeps becoming a room even after everyone leaves.
Scott Kenimond is a graduate student and TA in his third year of the NEOMFA at The University of Akron. He writes poetry, flash and micro fiction, creative nonfiction, and even dabbles in photography. His work has appeared in AshBelt, Villain Era Lit, and CrayfishMag. He believes one day he will be as big as his idol Madonna—if not already.
