POETRY: Vanessa Jimenez Gabb

from BASIC NEEDS

I will inherit money once.

Sometime next summer I am told. My father will be old enough and will pay the taxes on his teaching and it will be one sum and enough to buy a little land. Only for land. It is not for anything else.

My life will be not quite the same. I was thinking of you. I‘m moving to Hawaii for music. To write.
Forever grateful for you.
Men

I have known are changing their lives. Coming to life as a frontier.
To see the beginnings.

*

The obligatory conversation I have with myself. I am on a bluff wanting to get beyond. I am not
in New Orleans where the ladies are celebrating their marriages. It will be confusing. Not having
is the most explicable thing. Sound experiments. I am trying not to feel meaningless.

*

I climb into his lap and we look for each other a while without
Anything within the range of normal listening. Then I say the word Yes.
And he says the word Good. I think about how I got here. To a frame I don’t know. How could I
until I reach it.

Vanessa Jimenez Gabb

Vanessa Jimenez Gabb is the author of Images for Radical Politics, the Editor’s Pick in the 2015 Rescue Press Black Box Poetry Contest. Her work has appeared in PEN Poetry Series, The Brooklyn Rail, jubilat, Sixth Finch and VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. She teaches at Newark Academy in Livingston, NJ and is from and lives in Brooklyn, NY.