Poetry by Kendall Hoeft

Songs of Summer

I. How He Found You
              father and son

When the black wood bee found you,
he was roaring.

He roared when you ran through the sprinkler.
He roared when you laughed and cried.
He roared when you came in the front door, dripping.

When you tell me about the roaring black wood bee,
how he always found you, I want to put him in a jar of liquid.
I want to shake him, for you.

But when I tell you this, you only speak of the smell of honeysuckle,
indian summers on Avenida de los Flores.

As you reminisce and laugh,
I recline, soothed and fading,
as we inhale the deepest breaths
of jasmine and geranium.




II. How You Found Him  

As your mouth moves
specks of summer,
flecks of yellow light
effuse this Florida sunroom.

Childhood stories revive memories
of that suburban backyard utopia--
southern California in the 60’s.

You caught bees,
shook them comatose,
buzzed bodies dulled
by the repetition of liquid in glass.

You pinned them to wood,
then waited;
wanting to watch death
overcome.

Did you know then he wouldn’t come back?




III. Every last Tarantula Hawk

You used to believe she was a child-created legend,
your boy-mind birthed fantasy.
Her long, black-blue body
bigger than a splayed hand.
Dark legs,
red wings--
hooked claws.

This creature would find the perfect hairy belly,
paralyze the large spider with a painful sting
then shave his abdomen clean and infest
her new nest with a spider-wasp egg.

You spent boyhood summers
watching the sky for these huge wasps,
looking for their spiders in the ground--
poking ice plants,
digging for life under blackness.

Two decades later, on that Colorado camping trip,
the origin of my arachnophobia,
you taught me to tease tarantulas from trapdoors
with a relentless feather.

Now, even after hours,
you still poke into that large web
to see what you can awaken.

​


What we don’t speak of

hushed tones, hushed tones.
We wouldn’t want to stir the water,
or start a fight.

Keep positive, chin up.
The rest--
under the rug.

Or in the backroom,
where father is in his daughter’s bed.

Hush.
We want to be happy.

Under quiet floorboards,
lie little pieces of who we are--
muted in polite, hushed tones.

​


After Glass

Hear the crackle of ice
on a hundred small lakes.

Little lines jag out like hangnails,
fragments of clear--
breaking off and jumping,
then breaking apart again.

We are held together by compression.

Underneath the tension of our brittle surfaces
we are weak--
crystalline fabrications
incapable of keeping ourselves whole.

I leave the shards on grey slate in my kitchen.

​

Bio: Kendall graduated from the University of Tampa’s Creative Writing M.F.A. program and currently teaches writing at Florida International University in Miami. Her poem, “How to Match the Sky,” was published in the Spring 2017 issue of Driftwood Press. Her poetry was featured by Shade Tree Creations; as she was awarded a winner in their Art Affair Writing Contest, 2014. The themes of her work include: freedom, authenticity and self-love.

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