He can’t respond to the man addressing him as Mr. Sport because he can’t talk, his tongue has been mangled, somewhat ineptly, and he sees the hilarity in this, being tortured by inept torturers, as another larger silent gentleman’s behind him, but if it weren’t him in the chair, if it were someone else and he was watching, he might be amused by these two dilettantes practicing the art of torture.
It's the middle of winter. My last submission was rejected with good cause. It went a little off the deep end.
Congratulations! Your employer is an open-minded, inclusive institution that has discovered a method to ensure the comfort of their gender non-conforming employees, and that method is buttons.
From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah
Nirvana
Label: DGC
Released: October 1st, 1996
Length: 17 songs, 54 minutes
Last time I saw you, a good foot separated the two of us. Walked up
I want to be a zygote again. / I want to be a dumb plant.
The woman sat on the train wrapped tightly in her coat. She stared at herself in the window and eyed the other passengers.
My therapist’s name was Sean. I remember that most of all because it was easy for me to say. The sound sh never caused trouble. I could curse or tell people to shut up all day long. But es caused a world of trouble.
When clearly it could be a mommy or even a child for that matter.
I remember Ian saying I was not a novelist and I think, as much as it pained me at the time to hear this, he was correct.
A woman waited in line in front of me, anxiously watching the television behind the plexiglass partition. The gas station attendant broke rolls of quarters in half and dropped them into the register. A second woman spoke on screen, dressed in an orange pant suit, matching neon lipstick and a gold crescent moon pinned to her lapel below her microphone. I imagined the petroleum-wax scent her breath might leave as she spoke.
I’m fascinated by the idea of nonlinear time — that linear time is a construct we use to make sense of the world. Now, maybe without linear time we’d all be mad. But I find great comfort in accepting the idea, intellectually, that linear time isn’t necessarily real.
She picks a bony honeysuckle blossom off the bush and sticks the stem under the elastic of her bathing suit bottom.
Can imagine it: black vans with windows tinted green like bug eyes, all those bodies stolen away like women in wartime.
The night after my book launch at Power House Arena in Brooklyn, I slept over at my friend Logan’s house in Clinton Hill. In the morning as she dressed for work and I bemoaned stupid shit I’d said
He stands so close I can make out the threads on his polo shirt.
Suicide is all theory until you fall in love with a piece of shit.
BESTIARY was released in October of 2016 by Graywolf Press and has garnered a great deal of praise, including being longlisted for the 2016 National Book Award in Poetry. Kelly was kind enough to answer a few of my questions via email regarding the notion of self in poetry, how trauma and grief can manifest in art, and how her critical work informs (or fails to inform) her poetry.
