Zoolander
Isn’t everything an education?
The gasoline fountain of how
a mind came to be, its desiccation
hilariously apparent. It takes
intellectual work to wear garbage
and call it fashion. I applaud
the layered schtick of derelicte Derek,
too handsome, too simple to get it.
Derek’s school was of hard knocks,
chipping coal with a pickaxe,
dreaming between rocks of hot
mermen. So when Derek model-walks
to the mock-up of The Derek Zoolander
Center for Kids Who Can’t Read
Good, I feel the rage of someone
who’s been made to see his dreams
are small, realize they must be
at least three times as large.
I’m in Love with Bridgerton Season 2 Episode 3 and Wonder if it Could Love Me Back
between the clefts of Anthony’s brow frown, Kate’s
searing scowls, but it can’t. We’re only in the enemies
phase of the enemies-to-lovers, and I am not part of the plot,
no stinging bee, much less the instigator of any scandal
in the orangery. Like all romantics, I tend to fall in love
with love’s inevitability across impossible odds. Tonight
was my third rewatch this week. My husband says something
might be wrong with me. I shush him, reach for the kettle corn.
It’s important Kate and Anthony spit their lines just right to fuel
what’s coming: lust, infatuation, emotional bursts and thrusts.
The turn is imperceptible until a certain point of rupture.
O Fate, O Tragedy, O wrenching backstory that has me weeping
into a bowl of seeds, all a bench can represent in a grove of trees.
Tell me mistakes can be redeemed, salt deepen what is sweet.
When Was the Summer I Turned Pretty?
Or did I?
There was no sudden stroke of longing returned—
only, it seemed, an endless paging through fantasies,
novels smuggled, dimmed flashlight under the covers.
What would it mean to be wholly in the dream’s triangle,
tangled in a wallpaper’s cerulean stems and ocean
weeds? I think I could feel at home in someone else’s
beach house. I could flit between brothers, ruin a few
Christmases, ghost my mom in Paris. I am, I admit,
one of the million millennial women waiting for Belly
to make the right decisions. Funny, the high school
interns I work with like to debate, see scenes differently.
We’re just gazing from opposite ends of fate.
My young coworker asks if I know the ending. Her eyes
dance revelation, long dark curls, that little slump in her
shoulders from getting tall over recent summers.
She doesn’t see it coming, her turn, that corner.
Kimberly Gibson-Tran is an emerging writer with over 80 published poems and essays—most within the last two years. Her poems appear in New Verse Review, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Baltimore Review, Reed Magazine, Passages North, Rust & Moth, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the 2025 Rowayat Poetry Contest. Raised in Thailand, she now lives north of Dallas, Texas, and is submitting her first manuscript: The Voyagers.
The Marbled Sigh 