Discipline: Literature – poetry

Rebecca Kaiser Gibson

Discipline: Literature – poetry
Region: NEW HAMPSHIRE
MacDowell Fellowships: 1996
More: rebeccakaisergibson.com
The Loom

MUSHROOMS

by Rebecca Kaiser Gibson from Opinel

Myself as spore, landing,
composing, decomposing. All night,
a stout mushrooming
odor of under.

Here, here, and here
a turquoise one with Eilat stripe,
there, an eider gone gray.
There and there, look down,

a gathering in the woods, a cluster
of caramel ones, huddled. Beneath ripped leaves
young, cloaked shy,
or rounded, impertinent, popping

up in the grass, holding
skirts above the dew,
a circle of similars, persisting
even unseen.

A green-black
on its clumsy side,
fallen from no clear place,
reeks.

Not to mention
the one I bring to the kitchen
table, intending to dissect
it, to find that perfectly
formed diminutive of it

inside it. I stop to find
its name, to begin by words
to learn what is: long stem,
brown top hat, sour

smell. When I cut it open
a worm looks out.

My own eyes open.

Mushrooms

COCONUTS
Tamil Nadu

By Rebecca Kaiser Gibson from Opinel

Wearing a yellow necklace,
turban of sun, a singlet, blue,
machete tucked into waistband
flat against flat copper belly,
with feet wrapped in twine,
he scaled up, straight up it seemed,
the coconut palm, padding
the slim trunk like a lover,
to green fruit he hacked down
with swift blade. Flashing
a toothless grin at me -
a leer? I refused to believe.
I wanted,
at the temple for Meenakshi
the fish-eyed goddess,
those coconuts, splattered
in milky gratitude, at her stone feet,
my own façade to crack.

Coconuts, Tamil Nadu

MIRROR
for Deborah Digges

by Rebecca Kaiser Gibson from Opinel


Can she see? Without her I watch
the pink and silver streak of dawn,

that rough mirror, touch.
High there, over, and in dreams,

on the ledge, light water flickering,
contending with occasional words

(vobiscum, on crumpled paper)
written elsewhere, facing from height, mountains behind,

an ocean before, she brings her collectibles:
brass candlesticks, wren nests, whale with lumps

trumpeting, blue animal saltshakers, unused omelet pans,
rock star crockery, tiger barb verbiage, seaweed.

So anxious in her dying, those fishes, the molly-like
policemen in snazzy radar, detected

her purseful of wine and chewing gum,
hopeful of prescriptions, smirking.

Indistinguishable in anguish could she count
on me or anyone there, attentive?

Mirror

Rebecca Kaiser Gibson’s debut novel is The Promise of a Normal Life, (Arcade Publishing, Feb. 2023). Her poetry collections are Girl as Birch (2022), and Opinel (2015), Bauhan Publishing. Her poetry appears in Agni; Barrow Street, Field; Green Mountains; Greensboro; Interim, Harvard; Massachusetts; Ocean State; Passengers; Salamander; Slate; Tupelo; and VerseDaily among others. Her prose has been published in The Harvard Review; Northwest Review; and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Tupelo Quarterly.

In addition to Macdowell, she has received fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Vermont Studio Center and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. As Fulbright Scholar she taught in India. She taught poetry at Tufts University for 23 years, then founded, and runs The Loom, Poetry in Harrisville, a poetry reading series.

Studios

Chapman

Rebecca Kaiser Gibson worked in the Chapman studio.

Chapman Studio was funded by Mrs. Alice Woodrough Chapman in memory of her husband, composer George Alexander Chapman. Symmetrically massed, the building is stuccoed on the exterior with a natural, unpainted cement. Its unusual half-timbered ornament consists of slender, knotty spruce poles painted a dark green color. A central, peak-roofed entrance porch appears on the north side…

Learn more