Lately, I have been buried in the dust of daily life. The most hectic time of year at the middle school. New dogs. The son home for a brief 6 days before returning south to school for the summer. Trying to write covered in dust just leaves crumbs on the paper.

Luckily, some spring showers have come to wipe things clean. The final proof of The Imagined Life of the Pioneer Wife arrived today, and it is more lovely than I could have imagined. Parchment paper. Internal botanical illustrations. An amazing photographic cover. It should be available for purchase VERY SOON! I will be sure to let you all know. Working with Redbird Chapbooks has been a delightful experience all around. They took extreme care with my words and in making sure they were presented in a beautiful way.

And…my residency is less than a month away! I have made my travel arrangements to head to the Kimmel-Harding-Nelson Center for the Arts on June 10, and I hope to be posting regularly while there to keep you updated on new projects and how I handle all that time alone with my thoughts.

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(and now it’s time for a word from our sponsor…one of them, anyway)

Also, good friend and fellow poet Kristin LaTour’s new chapbook Agoraphobia is now available from dancing girl press, who will also release my chap We Build Houses of Our Bodies later this year. Check out Kristin’s book and the press, now having its summer mixtape promotion – 5 chaps for 25 dollars!

Reading Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke today. This quote was what I needed as I am full of questions – one month away from my residency and the end of the school year, I am making lists of questions that I want to answer when I have two weeks on my own to devote to writing and unlock the doors.

This April was not my best poetry month. I didn’t get to as many events as I would have liked, I failed on poem-a-day big time, and I didn’t do as much writing overall as I would have liked. My amazing friends Rachel Bunting and Kristin LaTour raised over $2000 for the Bullycide Project by writing a poem-a-day this year, and I enjoyed reading the Pulitzer Remix Project sponsored by the Found Poetry Review.

But I am gearing up for a big summer: a two-week residency at Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, a release date for my manuscript that may be earlier than anticipated (more news soon), and two chapbooks that should also see release between June and October. 

I have a new project or two in mind, but I don’t have the energy right now to get it started – between the new dogs, the end of the school year, and some general malaise, I need the new start that the June will bring to me. 

Tuesday night, we brought home new dogs, 2 1/2 year old brothers from the local shelter. We named them Gunner (after our favorite football team – Arsenal FC) and Scout. Despite a little “first-day-left-alone” mischief, they are settling in well and are very sweet, affectionate boys. I have not, however, been used to the energy of young dogs for quite some time, and I am exhausted. (They are worth it – but I’m tired.)

It’s also nearing mid-quarter and “we-give-up” time at work, the middle-schoolers with a horrible case of spring fever, especially since the weather has been less than spring-like in the Chicago area. It’s also the time of year when there is a sudden “push” for 8 million decisions to rear their heads, decisions that should be made BEFORE we leave school. This makes for a very stressful time.

Unfortunately, it is poetry month events and  writing that have taken the biggest hits. By the time I have arrived home this week, taken care of the dogs, made dinner, worked out, and taken care of the dogs again, I hit the pillow and it’s all over. Tonight, for example, I had planned to attend a Rhino magazine reading in Evanston. By noon, the prospect of going home, taking care of the dogs, and then driving 45 minutes to an hour to get to the reading by 6 PM was too much for me to think about. So here I am, chilling with Gunner and Scout who are curled by my feet, chewing on their stuffed hedgehogs. I may be a poetry copout, but for the first time this week, I am relaxed.

Besides, every month is poetry month, isn’t it?

The collection is firmly rooted in the turbulence of the 70s and 80s – early mentions of Vietnam and Three Mile Island hint at the domestic and personal implosions that will follow. The reader is whisked into the family album and shown not just the best photos – the ones in frames or carefully-pasted scrapbooks – but the candids, the blurred shots, the ones that company usually never sees. These narratives of descent into family disintegration and of the wild upward splash of emerging sexuality are firmly rooted in popular culture – a Barney Rubble bank saves the day when the car breaks down, the Members Only jacket means belonging, and Pam Grier and Wonder Woman are role models. No details are spared, although some of them may be a bit folded, faded, and rounded at the edges like old Kodak prints from the 70s.

The opening poem “A Broken Frame” sets up the idea of the narrator as outcast as its refers to a relative “marked/out, maybe with black wax,/which runs to the bottom corner/where the frame is cracked.” The manuscript is divided into sections – in the first, called “aperture,” we read of a childhood and young adolescence marred by the infidelity and illness of the speaker’s mother and an awakening sexuality in the speaker. In “blowup,” the speaker’s sexual life (from first crushes to one-night stands to hustling to acceptance of his bachelor life) is both simple and explicit enough to be real. And the last and title poem provides us with a “resolution” that uses photography terminology in a more experimental form.

These poems give us narrative scenarios that function much like scenes from a movie. Kelley is also a fiction writer, and those skills show in this collection of poetry. Each poem has a narrative arc and, more often than not, loops back to the opening detail in some way. My favorite piece in the collection is “Broken Things” which begins “My mother hovers now, whipping this world/with damaged blades, her selective amnesia/is rudderless, requires a stabilizing hand/from my father, the elephant who never forgets…” The poem revisits many of the themes in earlier poems and ends “and even from this distance I can hear/her distress call, waiting for a message/that I have forgiven her, and I have./Even broken things can still fly.”

You can find the book at the link above. If you are a child of the 70s or like your poems with a strong narrative bent, then Render will be a collection you want to read.

Playing around with phrases today, a sort of continuation of the tiny little poem I wrote the other day. I don’t know that it makes sense, but it’s okay just to play around once in a while. Again, although it’s Day 20 of the month, this will count as Day 13 for poem-a-day.

without you

the seaboard floods, poisoned

fish in the sunlit bay, my fingers

sunk like hooks into their scales

*

all the knives smell of onions,

all projected theologies just

dull, empty murmuring

*

all my hubris dragged clean

out like a labor – that push,

that pain a ransom unpaid.

*

So I started to think about the draft I wrote earlier in April, which took lines from other poets about this traditionally spring month. And I felt I needed to take a different take on  this particular month.

So, for Day 19 (but only the 12th poem):

April, Redux

What blows. What freezes. What weather

grips our tender flesh and squeezes hard.

What floats. What floods. What waters rise

and lift the heavy boxes that hold our days.

What crashes. What thunders. What clouds

billow and slip tears beneath our eyelids.

What hides. What is discovered. What fear

behind the doors, beneath the bloody boat.

*

So even though it’s day 17, I offer here Poems 10 and 11, one a very brief little nugget and the other a revision of a poem in a series I was working on earlier in the fall using titles from “Battle Hymn of the Republic” lyrics.

Day 10: “without you”

without you

*

a 19th-century tubercular

lung-clenched, linen-fisted

awaiting a waft of salt air

*

Day 11: Succor to the Brave

succor to the brave

you crawl across concrete, broken bottle

mosaic pressed into your knees, and

you bleed for me

and I am sick at the sight, heaving,

wailing while you suffer, still

you bleed for me

and I shrink from your shredded flesh,

your war-fresh stigmata, yet

you bleed for me.

I flinched as I poured the alcohol, first in

your wounds then into our mouths -

you bled for me

and I dabbed with my best tenderness

at the places you were broken and

you bled for me

and then I cradled your head and stroked

your hair, your mangled limbs in our bed  -

my God – how you bled.

So, I may valiantly try to recover this weekend – if I can finish the metric crapton of grading that I have to do, my husband will be out of town, so I will have a quiet house and no particular schedule to follow. Otherwise, consider this post the towel flying in from the manager’s corner, telling the referee to stop the fight. Beating yourself up isn’t as great as it seems in Fight Club.

 Rejuvenation

Finally spring, we scribe our skins

with shapes of flowers, steal water

from birdbaths for our strange

ablutions. After this, we will not be

the same. Our fragile bones will steel

our loneliness, single socks drawn

from the dryer and reunited, our

sadness clean and shed, all of our

dry skins curled in storage to share

as stories in our old age. We will pluck

the new shoots from sun-streaked

meadows, shine scratches our throats.

Steam rises from the dew in early

morning, soaks our sleeves with mist.

Inside, a kettle sings on the stove.
It sings summer, summer, summer.