Kimberly Grabowski Strayer is a poet and horsewoman from Kalamazoo, Michigan. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Superstition Review, Midwestern Gothic, Pretty Owl Poetry, VECTOR Press, and others. Her chapbook, Afterward, is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press. She is currently pursuing an M.F.A. in Poetry at The University of Pittsburgh.
FROM AFTERWARD:
She remembers learning as a young girl about the hollow bones of birds and considers the breaking in this way—her small pubic bone and the carcass of a gull she found on the shore as a child. She can’t help but think we are fascinated by injury, that lives depend upon it—the systematic forced entry, the repetition. Desire unraveling into anatomical parts we can study, try to understand. Her mouth, she thinks, could be a bird’s—could make sustenance out of everything she could not stomach. They didn’t speak to me, I don’t know who did it. And the way the birds call out to one another even as they are dying, hide their sickness so well—I was knocked out, out of this world.