First, the beast showed up in the middle  
of the night, entered the gates without 

a sound, sauntering through the field as if 
this was its home, my own home. Then came

the day and refused to absolve me of my girlhood, 
which was also its own. Its lovely face filled 

the streets of my imagination, & though we are  
both exhausted, it is just getting started. It does not

know what it wants with me. Its gaze, other-worldly,  
carrying with itself the portals to my other-selves

who await us patiently, bearers of thorns and honey, 
always speaking without uttering a word, leading me

to my many crucifixions, until I am readied for my own 
wanting. It has been told before, the tale of the beast 

and the man, the beast and man, the beastman. Man  
with too many eyes, limbs far reaching beyond its moat. 

I cannot say I did not see the signs; I cannot say  
I did not sleep with a sharp blade clutched in my fists. 

When, finally, the day of the awakening comes, I rise 
girl no more. Instead, I am another, I am other. 

And the gnawing has just begun. 

My boyfriend will eat
an entire apple in one sitting.
Peel, pulp, core. Hands me
the stem when he’s done.
Seeds in his gut. The calyx
a dank star. An orchard grows
inside him. The tongue
that slicks the skin. Hands
perfumed with bruised sugar.
His kisses a tender lament.
The heart that glows. How he takes
everything the fruit offers
and leaves nothing
but the stem. I let my body
follow. Set my jaw soft.
Rapt, greedy, this devotion.
Tough armor. Red glow. Yellow
flesh. Every bite a fall
from grace.

First, there was nothing, then there was me.
Hot summer day. Cosby Show on repeat.
Patriarch in his sweaters.
Dropping bygone knowledge.
His only son wasn’t listening.
“Theo” would’ve fit me, but my mother 
& John Travolta. Welcome Back, Kotter. 
Maybe he’ll be a heartthrob,  she said. 
Locks that go on forever.
My father:  Maybe he’ll be a conqueror,
but he’s got such a pale color.
Namesakes, bad omens,
he scoffed as he held me. Foreigner
on the radio: I want to know what love is.
The world, even then, was burning.
Refugees moved. Trains derailed.
Futures hijacked. We patted ourselves on the back
for the lasting peace we had made.
Grandfathers chomping cigars, shaking hands,
saying  look at what we have made.
Bloodline secure. Which
halfway through existence,
I see the value of more
& more. Studies show
our lifespans are extending
all the time. We’re living
more than we’re dying. I’m sorry,
my father failed to see it. He lived
with abandon. I forgive him,
for when he panicked & ran.
What we do when we see our own mortality.
My mother liked to say, like mothers often say,
you were lucky to be born here.  Now. At this time.
I wonder how that first cigarette, that first Tab
with my aunt tasted when I was milkfed
& she had time for herself again.
Good. The chances were good.
We knew what love is.

The shadow I cast when I stand  
in the sun has disappeared
beneath the trees, shadows
of crows over the roof
of the post office, or the field
of clover they fly above, throats
open, stitching the world
together with a fine thread,
doing the work of belonging.
Nothing is too trivial to love
enough to walk toward it,
your footsteps leaving 
badges on the earth, even
the nettles that chafe
your ankles worthy of love,
sparks of pain, like your
shadow, that prove
you’re alive.

All our windows open, steady drizzle on the kudzu’s 
broad backs, birds making their music like this isn’t North 
Carolina, but a tropical rainforest, and we’re somewhere 
deep in the palms and vines. But it’s our own ferns and fiddleheads, 
evergreens and sugar maples, trillium blooming, or on the verge, 
for no one in particular, for everyone in particular, as if to say, 
Go on, enjoy it. Rain, flowers, time on earth. The apple I  
hand-picked at the market. Braiding my friend’s hair, silver  
in my fingers, how I tie a tiny bow gently at the end 
just as the sun comes out. I want to believe this is true power, that 
kindness is the only weapon worth wielding, and I wield it, 
land blow after blow to my enemies, without mercy. 
Mercy. Bring the wine. Set the table for surprise guests.  
No matter the plates don’t match and we’ve run out of chairs, 
only that there is bread and laughter, enough to go around. 
Parades, in spite of—Pride, in spite of—Please, someone answer all my 
questions about hummingbirds and the little futures we are 
reaching for, the ones rising above the horizon right before our eyes,  
such intoxicating visions, our truest selves, with nothing to hide. Go on. 
Trust the child standing barefoot in the rain, her face turned 
up to the sky. Trust that crescendo building in your chest is your 
voice, singing what you need to hear, the stone-heavy echo 
welled from darkest springs. Go ahead. Open the door. No one can 
explain how to love the world. It doesn’t happen all at once. But 
you can start here. Tonight, with yourself. Someone near you. Let it go 
zigzagging town to town. Look, there. It’s already coming back around.

You like to fight. You desire sweat  
and snap of bicep,  
thick resource of thighbone,  
shouldering aside obstacles. 
You like to thrust your way in and find 
something hard and real to go up against— 
call it a wall, call it 
your brother. Call it the angel  
who came to wrestle 
but was forced to bestow  
a blessing. Strength is a woman  
with her hand knotted in a lion’s mane.  
Yours to claim or disavow.  
I wield no gun,  
slingshot, nor lightning bolt.  
Only the memory  
of membrane and synapse, 
how you once had to belly-crawl 
through my very body 
to get into the world.  
I live in you as beauty,  
call it spirit or flesh, 
call it a swift elbow strike  
to will the wall DOWN 
that separates—let mine be the blow  
that wakes the castle 
from its dream of parapets and spikes.  
Let mine be the courage  
of the trembling tongue 
that confesses its true need, 
so you can lie in my arms, a cub again 
at last, a sheaf of immortal flowers.

Last summer, I rose 
before dawn, crept 
through the house still 
pregnant with sleep, 
pulled on tattered jeans,  
a stained sweatshirt, 
a baseball cap  
ragged with wear, 
grabbed my coffee and lunch 
from the fridge, and drove 
south to Watsonville 
to unload grapes 
in the early morning light. 
All day, I shoveled them 
into the destemmer, 
then into the juicer, 
the golden liquid 
sweeter than ambrosia. 
I filled tanks to ferment, 
piled the empty stems 
picked clean onto 
the compost heap, 
refilled the tank on the fork- 
lift, hid the keys, 
and followed the sun 
that had already set, 
chasing the low glow 
at the horizon  
as the stars came out, 
constellations 
I could hardly raise 
my eyes to see.

We were living in a blue room, somewhere near  
the coast. The trees were tall and green as sleeping men,  
bent against the wind. There were blackberries,  
apple farms, roaring waves of storms. Long December  
foghorn nights, the distant tinny ringing of a bell.  
We watched the ships go by, the seagulls flock  
and spread. We stayed up late and read Neruda 
in the dark, returning every nerve. So close it seemed  
the other person’s body was our own. Eyes for eyes,  
hands for hands, waiting for the other one to come.  
It wasn’t beauty but a lack of time. We saw the stars  
dissolve, the shifting range of blues against the peaks.  
Mountains in the distance. Black hills. Moon. There was  
a time, a period of days and nights before the end.  
We were living in a blue room, and we were happy.

I am taken with the hot animal
of my skin, grateful to swing my limbs

and have them move as I intend, though
my knee, though my shoulder, though something
is torn or tearing. Today, a dozen squid, dead

on the harbor beach: one mostly buried,
one with skin empty as a shell and hollow

feeling, and, though the tentacles look soft,
I do not touch them. I imagine they
were startled to find themselves in the sun.

I imagine the tide simply went out
without them. I imagine they cannot

feel the black flies charting the raised hills
of their eyes. I write my name in the sand:
Donika Kelly. I watch eighteen seagulls

skim the sandbar and lift low in the sky.
I pick up a pebble that looks like a green egg.

To the ditch lily I say I am in love.
To the Jeep parked haphazardly on the narrow
street I am in love. To the roses, white

petals rimmed brown, to the yellow lined
pavement, to the house trimmed in gold I am

in love. I shout with the rough calculus
of walking. Just let me find my way back,
let me move like a tide come in.

I can tell you that some things vanish
without ceremony—a town can lose its name
and keep the post office, or keep the name

and lose the rest. There still marks a point
on the map where it began, but the work’s long done;
the road grown over with bleeding hearts and alder.

You can walk there. The gravel crunches 
under the phantom buzz of chainsaws, and fog
licks at the gridded hillside like an old debt.

Each stump is a headstone,
a biography in every ring. You think you see
a form in the mist—a thrashing elk, or a bobcat

or the shape of work that once
held the valley upright. Every road here
leads to another road that stops

at a locked gate, a washout,
a view of nothing but cloud.
Acceptance lives somewhere past that.

They say the forest heals, some say faster
than the heart—Scotch broom,
thistle, the thin gray line of runoff

that feeds the river in winter.
If there’s holiness in this, it’s in the rot,
the glacial comeback of what was taken.

Once I dreamed the salmon spoke
in a tongue I almost understood—
a language of loss, but also return.

They swam upstream through
clear-cuts and culverts, their bodies bright
as stripped wire, and I woke thinking

maybe the land dreams us too,
and stirs awake each time we leave
another scar across its ribs.

Docks rust and rot beside the river,
the paper mill sighing its white smoke
like a ghost rehearsing its final exit.

On the coast: blown glass, fish smells
and salt wind—the gulls screaming
for everything we drop.

Sometimes I go there just to see
where the road gives out at the jetty,
where the land admits defeat. Or victory.

No revelation, only the dull
thought that everything moves
toward water, then into it.

I’m somewhere inland still,
standing in the rain, or threat of it,
watching a fern push through the asphalt.

The sky        as always         undecided 
gray, opening, closing—
slack mouth of forgiveness, of apology.

teach us there can be movement 
in stillness. in every broken syllable 
of traffic a syllabus that says
while you are suffering we are all
going to be unwell—let us 
instead distill business as usual 
down to the speed of a tree eating 
light. as usual, business is built 
from freight trains and warships
even when ‘it’s just coffee.’
these bridges should only connect 
the living, so when the living turn 
again toward death worship
it’s time to still the delivery of plastics 
and red meats to the galas of venture 
capital. to reject our gods if they are 
not the gods who teach us all that comes 
from dirt returns to it holy—
the holiest word i know is no. 
no more money for the endless
throat of money. no more 
syllogisms that permission
endless suffering. no more.
and on the eighth day of a holiday
meant to represent a people 
fighting occupation my teachers 
who stretch a drop of oil into a week 
of light take each other’s arms
across eight bridges of this settler colony 
singing prayers older than any country 
as the chevron burns in the distance.
o stilted vernacular of life—
o pedagogs of the godly pausing—
what mycelia spreads its speaking
limbs beneath the floors of our cities. 
the only holy land i know
is where life is. in the story 
i was taught alongside my first 
language it takes god six days 
to make the terrible world 
and on seventh day he rested
and on the eighth we blocked traffic.