Remember that memory.

In this dimness when the sounds I make

are foreign, my home is not my own.

when I think of another winter

and the distant whiteness of its walls—

when even the sun seems set

outside the world. In this dimness

the edge of things removed

to thought the numb call touch,

remember that memory—

the young black self

the whole black body painted hot

by the fresh orange scene in the basement

of our old house when I was nine.

When it was my turn

to keep the fire going while my family slept —

my father off divorced somewhere, my older brother resting

after work, and what shadows hovered at the fringe of light

spilt from the furnace’s mouth—

I stuck my shovel in the flame,

had its intensity

its heat travel through a vein in the handle

to a part of my head.

The coals gotten smaller, brighter.

Out of that fire, my frightened shovelling in the night

now a framed power, that young effort

made a little orange scene

kept the whole world excited—

gathered near its center.

In this dimness where I can’t tell

if my longing is my own, it is gotten winter.

Above me I watch a jet

that be’s perfectly still, yet gets so distant,

goes so pointless. I could take a plane,

fly from here to somewhere small

till I’m ashes of myself—

but everything burns repeatedly

or keeps burning. Remember that memory.

I am dark with effort, back at my mother’s house

someone’s thinking of me, and old and smothered flame

gets waked, and it warms the gap

between image and real light.

the poem begins not where the knife enters

but where the blade twists.

Some wounds cannot be hushed

no matter the way one writes of blood

& what reflection arrives in its pooling.

The poem begins with pain as a mirror

inside of which I adjust a tie the way my father taught me

before my first funeral & so the poem begins

with old grief again at my neck. On the radio,

a singer born in a place where children watch the sky

for bombs is trying to sell me on love

as something akin to war.

I have no lie to offer as treacherous as this one.

I was most like the bullet when I viewed the body as a door.

I’m past that now. No one will bury their kin

when desire becomes a fugitive

between us. There will be no folded flag

at the doorstep. A person only gets to be called a widow once,

and then they are simply lonely. The bluest period.

Gratitude, not for love itself, but for the way it can end

without a house on fire.

This is how I plan to leave next.

Unceremonious as birth in a country overrun

by the ungrateful living. The poem begins with a chain

of well-meaning liars walking one by one

off the earth’s edge. That’s who died

and made me king. Who died and made you.

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.