ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Devin Kelly earned his MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and co-hosts the Dead Rabbits Reading Series in New York City. He is the author of two collaborative chapbooks as well as the books Blood on Blood (Unknown Press), and In This Quiet Church of Night, I Say Amen (forthcoming 2017, CCM Press). He edits for Full Stop, works as a college advisor in Queens, teaches at the City College of New York, and lives in Harlem.
Also by Devin Kelly:
Blood on Blood
A Good Leave
After Leaving the Funeral of My Friend's Father, I Don't Know How to Deal With the Sound of Us Crying
Previously in Glass: A Journal of Poetry:
New Interpretations of Faith
Poets Resist
Edited by Catherine Chambers
October 20, 2017
Edited by Catherine Chambers
October 20, 2017
Daily Life
Just past happy hour,
the beer eight dollars again.
I peel off a ten, leave the change
to tip. Sports & more sports —
every day the same language
is now a kind of coping
turned in a more provocative light.
In an inter-rupture of common
silence, my father once said
you need only a pen & paper
to change the world. I came here
for conversation, but no one's
talking. Last night I dreamed an army
of ants arriving for my body
in my lover's bed & woke to find
just one, which I let live.
I'm all for sharing now.
What passes for daily life
in an age of insurrection,
where my phone's search
for health insurance at a bar
turns into a poem
as Bieber plays? When I was
little, I harbored a sharp pain
between my ribs. I didn't tell
a soul for years. After the EKG
the doctor told me
it was nothing, just a simple
swelling of what separates
my bones. The pain's back now,
cutting deeper. Each day this ache
orbits the beating of my heart.
I used to spend that last dark
before sleep on my knees
in prayer, my father's breath
from the other room
a sign of god. & though
my faith is nothing now
but an unlit lantern's wick,
I have begun to believe again
in miracles, that the space between
each longing muscle's pulse
is a place to build a home,
despite the shortness
of our breaths.
I'm telling you this now
because I need to say something
of substance in this room
we share. You can trust me.
I'll do anything to keep you
alive. I want pressure on my chest
like bed sheets. Vibration of vowels.
Simple touch of skin. One hand's
kindness building some map of joy
out of the quiet of a face. Our history
belies protest as nuisance,
death as mere abstraction.
There are bodies in the street
& they are as real as pain.
If I have a heart attack
it will feel like I feel
every day. I won't
know it till I’m dead.
I wrote this awhile ago, beginning it on my phone the day after the protests at JFK in the wake of the travel ban. I was in a bar and had just finished working with my high schoolers, many of whom were or would be affected by this administration. I was searching for some foothold in the mundane, I think, as a comfort. Looking back now, that feels so long ago, and my worries have compounded and doubled down. They have, so many of them, become real. I don't know if the mundane exists anymore. It is a privilege to say I even had an experience of it, I think. It is definitely a privilege to have been able to retreat to it for comfort. But this poem was searching for something like that, coming to a realization that everything is charged. It is perhaps the opposite of what I mention in the poem — these pains in my body being reduced to something simple, harmless. But even then the worry still remains. I don't know how to shake it.
Poets Resist is published by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
