Elizabeth Lash on Kimberlee Smith's "The End of Fun and Games"

I met Five-Two contributor Elizabeth Lash earlier this month at Noir at the Bar NYC. Finding her feedback on the readings insightful, I invited her to comment on this year's 30 Days of The Five-Two. She sent in the following about the tour-ending poem. —Gerald So


The nerve endings in my body tingled, and my hair stood on end by the time I finished reading "The End of Fun and Games". It was an experience only heightened by the emotional distance the poet took from her subject—that of her younger self experiencing the death of a classmate.

What I loved about this poem is that Smith uses certain details both to strip away artificial sweetness and to recall the reader's youth—a factory behind which she and her classmates smoke smells not only of candy, but also of pollution; the color of her dead classmate's eyes are the color of "peppermint schnapps." Smith references The Sound of Music ("Sixteen Going on Seventeen") while reminding us that life there is no "Taylor Swift" song—what should be adolescent joy at that age is instead only anguish. Even the metaphor of the "exploded copper stars" reflects a violent destruction of innocence, seemingly representing not only his dried, spattered blood but also his achievements--no more stars ever to be awarded.

One knows definitively, by the end of the poem, that all goodness and innocence have been destroyed in this town, leaving no avenue except to escape. The description of hallucinogens as stamps seems particularly poignant: some choose to send their souls away temporarily, while others have chosen it as a final solution.

—Elizabeth Lash

Day 3: Women of Mystery

For retired Suffolk County (L.I.) police officer and Women of Mystery blogger Kathleen A. Ryan, it's "The End of Fun and Games" on Day 3 of 30 Days of The 5-2.

(Kathy will actually be back on Day 17, posting from her personal blog.)

Bonus Entry: Longtime friend of The Lineup and The 5-2 Bill Cameron is officially posting next week, but today he offers "a sorta sestina" on his blog, Thinking With My Skin.

Kimberlee Smith

THE END OF FUN AND GAMES

This is not the moral decay
of The Waste Land by Eliot
or the rotten fuck off
of "Teenage Wasteland" by Townshend.
This is not poetic. Virtuosic. Cathartic.
It is the nightmare that follows
life to death in a town
where hope certifiably
expired on August 1, 1982.
So go on in, knowing
you are on the edge.
You will not make it home.
This is the end of fun and games.

Copper stars splattered across his cheeks
like water bombs exploding on pavement.
In thirty-year-old dreams I work to recall
How the event unfolded at all.
How do I remember his face so clearly?
As if I were standing
over his casket, still.
I was sixteen, he was seventeen.
This is no Taylor Swift love song.
These are the last warnings,
Never wander off in the dark.
Never hunt down some weed.
Never follow a hustler’s lead.

His eyes were the color
of peppermint schnapps.
His pitch of fiery hair
combed smooth for Picture Day,
bangs slashed straight across
his unmapped forehead.
A procession of our somber youth—
stoned and stunned and
broken beyond repair—viewed
the boy carved of putty.
The mortician painted him
stuffed him, presented him
to us, the semi-living.

We traded dime bags for hallucinogenic
stamps for travel anywhere
to escape that fucking town.
Swaggered down railroad tracks
behind the candy factory
smelling of fuel and SweeTarts
one flat summer night, heat
strangling, soiling, rutting, joyous.
Searching for something, whatever , wherever.
Slicing in and out of thin air,
driving—headed to Vailsburg
Give us freedom, or give us death.
Given? Both.


Kim reads "The End of Fun and Games":



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Kim confesses: "I wrote 'The End of Fun and Games' about a high school friend who was murdered. It was the first, but not the last, experience I had of a friend dying violently while I was young. My hometown became a place of dead ends and lost hope, shrouded in danger."

KIMBERLEE SMITH is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer who lives with her children and menagerie on their farm in rural Connecticut. She received her B.A. in print journalism at the University of Southern California and her M.A. at the University of Sydney in Australia, where she lived for four years. Her work has been published in multiple literary journals and magazines. She makes a mean hard cider from the apples in her orchard and spends an inordinate amount of time trying to befriend Junior, the only rooster in her flock of chickens.