06 Jul Drop the Mic by Kim Chinquee
piano days, my fingers on the keyboard. It could have been the
perfect crime for me to win first place at my recital. It isn’t in my
genes, I guess, my mom suspecting I’d always be a failure. After
she left my dad, he cried in church. They got therapy. I was left
like a forearm, stuck eating a whole turkey. Vomiting. That’s
still in stereo-mode at times, but you learn to drop the mic. It’s
a shoehorn. It’s a star flake. It’s an amaryllis if it almost buds by
Christmas. I go to the park. I have three dogs. I’m vegan now.
As a child, my best friend was my cow. Her name was Iona.
About the Poet
Kim Chinquee grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin and served as a medical lab technologist in the Air Force. She received a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin, an MA from the University of Southern Mississippi, and an MFA from the university of University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Chinquee is the author of seven collections of flash fiction and prose poetry: Oh Baby, Pretty, Pistol, Veer, Shot Girls, Wetsuit, Snowdog, and the 2022 novel Pipette. She’s Chief Editor of Elm Leaves Journal (ELJ), Senior Editor of New World Writing, and Contributing Editor of Midwest Review. She’s published widely in journals and anthologies including The Nation, Ploughshares, NOON, Storyquarterly, Denver Quarterly, Fiction, Story, Notre Dame Review, Conjunctions, and others. Her work has received three Pushcart Prizes and a Henfield Prize.
This prose poem appears in her new collection of prose poems Contact with the Wild published in May of 2025 by MadHat Press.
Kim is director of SUNY—Buffalo State University’s Writing Major. She’s a competitive triathlete, a certified USA Triathlon Official, and lives with her three dogs in Tonawanda, New York.
The Poem of the Week feature is curated by literary legacy awardee R.D. Pohl.