Kathleen Kimball-Baker

She Feeds the Storm

In the season
of nursing, a woman’s
breasts come to know the ways
of thunderstorms, how a rumbling
begins far off, and a vigor seizes
the air, electrifies it, travels into
her chest, insisting on notice, how
atoms rearrange inside her body
to make fat drops that splat and
deluge and quiet the storm, how
the last drops roll to the cusp
of mink petals: tiny wet
opals, exchanged
for sleep.

Kathleen Kimball-Baker is a poet and dog-sledding enthusiast in Minneapolis. Her poems are forthcoming or appear in Magma, Water~Stone, Nimrod International, Poet Lore, The Hopper, Pangyrus, Abandon Journal, Nature of Our Times (poetsforscience.org), and elsewhere. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and is compiling a hybrid chapbook about being a biracial Latina dog sledder obsessed with extreme cold and wilderness