Aiming for Roses
When the lights in the house flickered then died,
Dad threw a blue tarp over the clothesline
to make a tent.
Mom forced a smile.
Isn’t this fun? Camping,
but without the bears and briars.
Dad lit the propane stove with a match.
We ate from the freezer till everything spoiled,
then mostly from cans, then mostly from nothing.
The hallway phone still worked, a mystery.
Mom stood in that dark hallway for hours,
laughing on the phone with her friends, pretending.
Dad told stories, taught me to whittle
sticks into spears, how to piss outside—
unzipping in the darkness, a babble of urine.
Those roses, he said, look thirsty.
The Night She Stopped Drinking
Her handgun jumped between targets.
I sat rigid at the kitchen table,
a plate of spaghetti gone cold.
I should erase my little mistakes, she slurred,
pointing the muzzle at my temple.
When she finally passed out, I removed
the cold, heavy bullets and scattered them
around the house like seeds—
in a living room vase, in an old shoe
under my bed, beneath my pillow
like a tooth she’d knocked from my head.
Mickie Kennedy
Mickie Kennedy is a gay writer who resides in Baltimore County, Maryland. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in POETRY, The Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, The Sun and elsewhere. His first book of poetry Worth Burning will be published by Black Lawrence Press in February 2026. Follow him on Twitter/X @MickiePoet or his website mickiekennedy.com.
Why these poems knocked Martheaus out:
Mickie should teach a class in openings. Both poems have gripping starting lines. Everything from "When the lights in the house flickered then died" to "Isn't this fun? Camping" reads like the start of a great flash fiction piece, especially through their use of place, character, and personality. And the first three lines of "The Night She Stopped Drinking" had my eyebrows reaching for the skies. Fascinating juxtaposition (the strangeness between the gun and the cold spaghetti), and also the lack of contextualization really energizes the scene.
While "Aiming for Roses" had a nice prose-y and conversational tone, there were some fun parallel phrasing parts. For instance, there were several lines that ended with these adverbial comments: "We ate from the freezer till everything spoiled, / then mostly from cans, then mostly from nothing. / The hallway phone still worked, a mystery. / Mom stood in that dark hallway for hours, / laughing on the phone with her friends, pretending . . . unzipping in the darkness, a babble of urine" -- it gives this similar pattern to the poem and the speaker has a personality (the type of speaker to keep adding on, for flavor).
Interview:
These poems each present a depiction of childhood and parenting. How do you see them next to each other? Should we take them individually?
Though I certainly believe each poem should be taken individually, they do inform and inflect each other. Both poems will appear in my first full manuscript, Worth Burning, which will be published by Black Lawrence Press in early 2026. Worth Burning has many thematic threads, but the book orbits a troubled and troubling mother figure—the same mother who appears in both of these poems. Throughout the course of the book, this mother figure moves through tremendous tragedy, but her grief turns to violence she aims at the child speaker. Victim and oppressor. Mother and monster. If you take these poems as a linked pair, you can see flickers of this paradox.
Don't think I'm ever going to forget the "babble of urine" or that absolutely amazing tooth fairy bullets image at the end of "The Night She Stopped Drinking." How do you decide if a metaphor or image hits the right tone for your craft?
Deciding between an image or a metaphor/simile is part of my late-stage revision process. The fun stuff. The nitty gritty. Once I’ve played around on the page, allowing myself to find what the poem truly wants to say or be, it’s far easier discerning between various craft elements. For example, a metaphor or simile creates a comparison between two things, and that comparison creates a distance between those two things, even as it bridges them together. On the other hand, a nonfigurative image simply is itself, so there is no distance. Some poems call for distance. Some poems call for no distance. Most poems call for both. But it’s hard to know what an individual poem needs until I’ve spent enough time with it.
The precise and engaging dialogue, the emphasis on setting detail, the use of character to drive these mini-plots. I know discussing genre and form can sometimes devolve into a snowball fight across nebulous lines in the snow, but both of your poems seem to be influenced by flash fiction, prose poetry, and maybe even visual media. Can you talk about where these poems' "voice" and style come from? Your influences or influencers.
I've been a lifelong collector of comics (specifically horror comics) so a comic strip’s visual action is always in my head as I'm writing poems. How an image can say so much without saying anything at all. How images can stack to form a suspenseful progression. I’ve also been reading a lot of Diane Seuss, and I’m endlessly inspired by the image-rich, cinematic way she approaches her childhood and hometown.