Featured Poet: Don Kimball, Concord
 Don Kimball is the author of two chapbooks, Journal of a Flatlander (Finishing Line Press 2009) and Skipping Stones (Pudding House Publications 2008). His poetry has appeared in The Formalist, The Lyric, The Blue Unicorn, and various other journals and anthologies. In 2007, he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize; in 2009, he was nominated for the Pen New England Literary Award; and he has won two first prizes and a second prize in national contests sponsored by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. Don currently hosts the monthly poetry reading series at Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord, NH.
Interestingly enough, I was reading a rather serious book – Guns, Germs, and Steel – when I started doodling in the margins and came up with many of the lines for “Elephant’s Trunk”. I had such fun revising this poem, often reading it out loud, laughing, as I heard the sounds the words made – it reminded me that, years ago, I used to enjoy reading poems and stories to my daughter and now she reads to our granddaughter. It seems a fitting tribute.
Elephant’s Trunk
for my daughter and granddaughter
One mammoth snout,
plunked between a whopping pair of tusks,
limber as a shower hose,
yet stout enough to uproot trees and stack
lumber; dainty enough to curl its dactyls
around a school-
girl’s pencil, to draw
sticklike figures, with ease, on legal
pads. Yet bad
enough, if displeased,
to squeeze
the squash out of a bratty
boy or girl, or by
sneezing, cause,
with elephantine schnozzle,
a blast, the cuss
loud enough to trumpet
an intergalactic cataclysm –
a tusker’s typhoonery
heard clear back to its trunk-
less, not-so-elegant
hyraxic ancestors.
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