Anna Kelley |
Back to Issue 10 |
Soul and silence. Blood and cloth.
Meat beneath the knife. The stone the knife was hewn from, heaved into the ocean and sunk past sight. When she says she wants to hover underwater in the tub until the sun sucks up the earth and the bath salts mummify her dark-stubbled skin, you’ll want to call her crazy. Don’t. Instead, call her the stop motion scattering of a mandala’s sands. Stinging nettle sundae, bone jalopy, pocket full of eggs. A single egg smacked into a seasoned pan, turning hard and yellow as the timer snaps onward. Last one in. Odd one out. Outer ring of a frosted planet, formed by the dust that meteorites knock from dead winter rock. Eye to the sky. Eye turned back in the head, regarding the sweet weeping rind of the brain. Little lentil buried in a steaming king’s cake. When daughters die, it is their names and not bluebottles that rumba across the caving stomachs and chew their spleens down to the pulp. So call your daughter dissolution, tail-swallowing snake, but do not fail to call her something lest she calcify. At last resort, name her the wordless, terrifying scream of a barking owl after the stars have replaced porch lights. It means hunger and fortune to those with slipshod hearts. |
Anna Kelley is pursuing an MFA in poetry at Syracuse University. She is a reader for Salt Hill. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cherry Tree, Literary Orphans, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Split Lip Magazine, CICADA, and others |
