Confession

I gave birth to a child

and placed her inside

a plastic bottle

then buried her

beneath a foot

of sand.

I understand

this may seem

a savage thing to do.

But I assure you—

you’ve done it too.

And at midnight

when you turn off the TV

and climb beneath quilted covers

when your children are snug in bed

dreaming orgies of lies

the endless feverish dance of selfish pleasures

Sometimes

it occurs to you

to remember.

And you wonder

whether she will live or die.

As it happens, friend

Last night I did some digging

And I can say this:

I have no answer

to your question.

***

Hello?

After forty days of fasting in the desert

you stumbled

out of the parking lot

into the wilderness—

rows and rows of identical

cream town homes

and condos crowded so close

they look

as though squeezed

from a tube—

It’s a place where the word

becomes flesh-colored stucco

and tends to produce its own

echo

An invisible map called How to live

has been built in to each interior wall.

You’ve been sleeping on the floors of caves

without reference point

for so long

you think it might help to follow

some simple instructions

This is a balcony.

Don’t fall.

Kim Jensen is a writer who has lived and taught in France, California, and the Middle East. Her first novel about a turbulent love affair between a Palestinian exile and an American student, The Woman I Left Behind, was published in 2006 by Curbstone Press, and her poetry manuscript The Red Rafters of the Word Room was a finalist in Fordham University's Poets Out Loud competition. In 2001, Kim won the Raymond Carver Prize for Short Fiction, and her work has appeared in Rain Taxi Review; Boston Book Review, Poetry Flash, Left Curve, al-Ahram Weekly, and Al Jadid, among others; she is on the editorial board of the Baltimore Review, and is Assistant Professor of English at Community College of Baltimore County.