Ice Carver: poems by Richard K Kent. Number 4 in Volume Five of our limited-edition Summer Kitchen Chapbook Series. Now available.

Cover image: vintage fabric swatch, “Foulard.” Mitchell & Church Company, The Waisting and Suiting House, Binghamton, New York. Series design by Ron Mohring.

Published: September 13, 2017 [49 copies]
23 pages
$9.00 

A professor of art history at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Richard K Kent teaches courses in Asian art history and in the history of photography. Aside from scholarly publications, he has published poems in Field, Tar River Poetry, The Antioch Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, and other small magazines. Also a photographer from adolescence, he has shown work, mostly drawn from ongoing series of pictures, in juried exhibitions throughout the United States.

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Train

~ on listening to John Fahey’s The Singing Bridge of Memphis, Tennessee

The dog didn’t understand  
why we held so tight to her collar  
as we crouched on the gravel incline.

We’d heard the whistle,
and then felt the clattering heave along the tracks,
which seemed to wobble before our eyes as the locomotive

and endless, endless freight cars rushed by with a roar.
It had been my sister’s spur-of-the-moment dare.
Why not get nearer than fear allowed

to the train that, toy-like, passed one field
away from our house? Didn’t every night
its distant clank and wail signal our entry into sleep?

Afterwards, more shaken that I’d ever admit, 
I stood back up in the steamy summer air
and stared into the silent hole it had left.
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