- Richard King Perkins II
Richard King Perkins II: two poems
Skinned Savanna
If I were younger,
then there would be a younger man
coming to find you
across the skinned savanna
and when he found you
he would stake his spear
in the ground outside your hut
and importune you with great magics
and togetherly you would
build tiny canopies of imago
across plains of dust and straw;
if I were only a younger man—
but before me now, yellowing,
is the fresh core of an apple
I don’t remember eating.
—Richard King Perkins II
Disappearance of the Tiny Dolls
Tiny dolls of her childhood
propagate within cardboard hiding places
like so many purring tribbles
keen to reassume their former mantle.
Creations of the vacuform age
they smile up at us
from a disjointed shoebox
with eager optimism
like the kids we once were
or the children
we were supposed to have
or the babies we did have
which were accidentally lost
and that we somehow managed to forget.
—Richard King Perkins II