STRIP ME NAKED
. After Rhea Carmon
Strip me naked. See a generation from potted meat, poke sallet, hot lard poverty. The sawmill where my great-grandfather lost his fingers and gained a high board Company Bed for his trouble. See the depths of chiseled coal mines or the distress of birthing babies not expected to live—like my three-pound momma so tiny she had a shoebox bed. See my grandmother racked with tuberculosis clinging to iron lung air. Strip me naked. See my other great-parents as teens crossing from Naples to Ellis Island. See my blood on Normandy’s beaches with Great Uncle Tommy Robbio. Strip me naked. Find outcasts downcast rising dragging depression, dyslexia, and deficiencies assumed to weaken sinews when struggle made them strong. This skin has birthed lawbreakers, policemen, drug dealers, homemakers, secretaries, drunkards, mechanics, teachers, counselors, military officers. Strip me naked. See my lovers, my fractures, my dreams. See words coursing in veins, documenting, protesting, celebrating, healing the past with the present, the living with the dead with such richness you wish to wear this skin…
but it’s mine.
……
This poem is from the chapbook On Phillips Creek, and can be found at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/on-phillips-creek-by-natalie-kimbell/ .
ON PHILLIPS CREEK celebrates the strength of women rooted to a place in Wise County, Virgina. Although the home place is gone, the stories, lives, and memories flow like a river through the author and onto the page. The chapbook begins at the source on Phillips Creek, flows through the natural world and ends with the journey of the author. This collection speaks of loss and it’s resurrective value as well as the enduring nature of family and memory.
Natalie Kimbell was born in Norton, Virginia, spent her early elementary school years in Worcester, Massachusetts, and then moved to Dunlap, Tennessee to find her home. She is a graduate of Sequatchie County High School and a graduate of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. She serves as an English and theater arts and creative writing instructor at her high school alma mater. This year, 2024, will mark her forty-first year as an educator..
Although writing most of her life, she only began releasing her writing in 2017. Since then, her work has placed in several contests and has appeared in publications such as the Appalachian Writers Anthology, Women Speak, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel as well as in The Mildred Haun Review and Tennessee Voices Anthology. Though primarily a poet, Kimbell has also published creative nonfiction and ten-minute monologues. In addition to her writing, she serves on the board of the Chattanooga Writers Guild.
The Paddock Review 