A Slice of Magical Realism with Your Pumpkin Pie

“We wouldn’t perish without poetry, but we’d be considerably less,” says contemporary, formalist poet Kim Bridgford. I concur.

Here she brings her fresh, vivid voice to a holiday steeped in sedate tradition.

This one is short, and so deceptively simply on the surface that it deserves more than one read. Chew on it a bit . . .

I hope you’ll find it as conceptually clever as I do. It made me smile wide.

Wishing you a blessed Thanksgiving week!

Inflatable Doll Is Bedazzled by the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade

There’s something here that stirs her in her soul—
Like Glory Hallelujah, his caress
The day that he got her from UPS—
Blues Clues, the Muppets, each Incredible,

Her hyperbolic family in a nutshell.
She loves their prideful air. In New York City,
It’s not her normal circumstance, with pity.

In this parade, they clear each obstacle.

And like the high school kings and queens in cars
That frame them like the faintest movie stars,
Her people wave and bobble like a myth.

Dare she begin to hope her offspring wreathe
The towered sky as Smurf or Looney Tune?
What rises up: the human or balloon?

— Kim Bridgford

Kim Bridgford is an educator, a critic, an editor, a fiction writer, a wife, a mother, an entrepreneur and the author of many volumes of poetry.