Featured Poet: Don Kimball, Concord
 Don Kimball is the author of a new chapbook, Skipping Stones (Pudding House Publications 2008). His poetry has appeared in the Blue Unicorn, Dogwood, The Formalist, The Lyric, and various other journals. His poems also appear in five recent anthologies, including The Powow River Anthology, The Other Side of Sorrow, Fashioned Pleasures: 24 Poets Play Bout Rimes With a Shakespearean Sonnet, and The 2008 Poets' Guide to New Hampshire. In 2007, Don's poem - “Prayer for My Father” - was nominated for the Pushcart Prize; three other poems won two first prizes and a second prize in national contests sponsored by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire.
Of his featured poem, “Deer in a Craft Shop,” Don writes:
My poems are often sparked by an anecdote, something I've read, a dream or what I've been privileged to observe. This poem began with an event I read about in our local newspaper - which bothered me for days until I wrote about it.
Deer in a Craft Shop
It might have been the early morning light
that caught her eye, while she dashed down a one-
way street that night, persuading her to cross
a wide divide - where, later in the day,
she would've had to wobble in the sun
for speeding cars to stop, before she'd dare
to trot the crosswalk. Now, beguiled by some
random need, she strides the four-lane street,
smashing through glitter into shards of glass,
and leaping down, not onto moss or leaves,
but the astonished sales floor. Mouths agape,
the city road crew stand outside to watch,
while the whitetail doe negotiates
a labyrinth of narrow aisles. “Oh, no -
there goes another vase!” yells one of them.
She stops behind a shiny case, as if
gazing with longing at a silver bracelet,
appraising the delicacy of her plight,
when light, that winking light, bewilders her,
invites her back to thrash some inner darkness,
where she attempts to vault a jeweler's bench
and leaps, with a shatter of window panes,
into the blinding glare - a wounded doe
falling two stories to a parking lot,
hobbling a trail of blood and broken vases.
“Deer in a Craft Shop” was first published in Schuylkill Valley Journal of the Arts.
For more information about Don Kimball visit:
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