Grudge Keeper
face / face her face / green marble square
face windows / day dark face / circles the meadow
face of / mother / mother / two mother/s ago we all
face hurt / / frown mother / lain /
face wet / boy boy b o y / We are here / her
face / black vein / her caw to / boy face / no no no /
face her away / face her dirt
face down / when she died /
[ ]
face no sound / face crawling / mother wrong
face dirt / eat marbles / We drop
face of death
face death
My lover asks
if I’m ok, his silver pinky rings wrapping my thumb
as we dawdle in the driveway,
We can hang out here,
his hand moving up my forearm, searching perhaps
for what I feel:
the planet spinning at zero point two three
miles per second under us, including us, slow enough
the sun pinks my face, some sign of pallor, gravel
mumbling under our steps near other guests.
There’s no hurry.
But there is
time to change with the times: to marry
another man, don a tuxedo, a bedazzled harness
over the coat, O-ring
agape across the lapel, surprised I’m still
here, asking for it,
be it permission or another pleasure.
Ben Kline lives in Cincinnati, Ohio. A poet, information professional, and one of the team behind the University of Cincinnati Libraries POETRY STACKED series, Ben is the author of Twang (ELJ Editions) and Stiff Wrist (fourteen poems,) as well as the 2026 Lambda Literary Award winning collection It Was Never Supposed to Be (Variant Literature.) His work has also appeared in Copper Nickel, The Journal, Palette Poetry, Four Way Review, DIAGRAM and other publications.
In “Grudge Keeper,” every line had to begin with the word face and mimic the unstressed iambs of crow caws. Especially a 12 caw of warning and the three short caws of alarm. This, I felt, would facilitate the poem sort of being in the “voice” of a crow. This poem is from a larger project I’m working on surrounding a murder of crows, venery, and the sharing of collective memory. Crows can remember a face and hold a grudge against it for up to 17 years, and matriarchs can pass the grudge via instruction.
Then I also for some reason decided it should be a shape poem that loosely conjures my dead mother’s face.
In “My lover asks,” the constraint was Charles Wright’s use of sestets and the intricacy of line pauses vs line breaks while also allowing myself to play with that constraint to move the emotions forward. I love a poem with a tightly wound speaker unraveling, unclenching, even if by nanometers!
