ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Kelly Grace Thomas is the winner of the 2017 Neil Postman Award for Metaphor from Rattle, a 2018 finalist for the Rita Dove Poetry Award, a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a Best of the Net nominee. BoatBurned, her first full-length collection, is forthcoming from YesYes Books in 2019. Kelly’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in: DIAGRAM, Tinderbox, Diode, Nashville Review, Sixth Finch, Muzzle and more. Kelly currently works to bring poetry to underserved youth as the Manager of Education and Pedagogy for Get Lit-Words Ignite. She is also the co-author of Words Ignite: Explore, Write and Perform, Classic and Spoken Word Poetry (Literary Riot). She is currently a reader for Tinderbox Poetry Journal. Kelly is also a screenwriter and novelist. She lives in the Bay Area with her husband.
Closer
My father left us
like weather. My mother sunk
next to the dock. Us daughters tried
to swim, became driftwood in the back-
yard. I am still somewhere.
Stuck at ten. Trying
to call a shipwreck home.
The past scolds look at her
blueburnt and barnacled.
I wash my mouth out
with waves. Closer, it says.
Her fiberglass dress.
She itches. Memory blooms
a rash. I scratch
to bleed. History is a dirty
ocean. And I am dangerous
with thirst. Most days I schooner.
Wait, nets empty. I can’t wind
the strength. Most nights, I drink
story or language. I can’t keep
either down.
“Closer” deals with a complicated history, a past that I can’t quite look in the face. The poem wrestles with the way my family has fallen apart and stayed together. When I was 10 years old, my family went bankrupt. A bad business deal left us in financial ruin. My father, divorced from my mother, but still close to us all, decided to move to Florida to rebuild his career and life. That summer, after they foreclosed his house, with ours next, my parents, my sister and I, boarded my dad’s sailboat, the only possession he had left. We spent a month sailing from New Jersey to Florida. It was a month of talking with the ocean and saying goodbye to one another. Twenty-some years later, I still struggle to write about this experience, the pain and joy. When drafting this poem someone in my workshop group keep commenting, “I don’t understand why your parents would be on this boat together. I don’t understand your family.” She wanted clarity. Facts. But that’s not what the past is built on. At the time a part of me felt stuck trying to explain an ocean of emotion, trying to soothe 10-year old me, trying to settle the waters of my past. But hurt is deep and murky, no matter how close you look. My past is crafted from saltwater memories and a thirst I’m forever chasing.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
