Two Poems by Kelly Gray

Two Poems: Kelly Gray

marshlands: I wander thee with a speculum in my hands, hitched by an umbilical cord from me to me, my face trailing in the brackish water.

Hitch me: to the backside of a doe so that we might arrow over juniper and sedge while smelling hunger and hunt.

I will rub her soft belly flecked with fleas. Her full white belly, pregnant with fawn. I will rub what was lifted over fences and fields. Hitched to us: the shape of a daughter.

Let me remove what will haunt the doe.

Abort the fawn who sleeps in her amniotic waters, not yet brought to grass.

I woolgather for my child, always.

Breasts leak against barbwire.

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K E L LY G R AY

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My feet blister with ghosts looking for ground. The salt tide hitched: also. Bulging.

Now, the dark fish coming.

Now, the water taking my face.

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T WO P OE M S

The Night Has an Edge Where It Is Still Pale On the hill is a cabin soured by wasp nests. The wasps move between the trees with their cocked knives like villains floating across a movie screen that you can see but fail to understand. How to fail a villain?

To keep the knife in your own hand. The insects have built a nest in my bedroom wall. At night, they bring water to cool themselves and it makes a sound like a deck of cards shuffling. Every night a spirit of a croupier wakes to slam a door. In the morning, the fountain is filled with pennies and wasp bodies. Forget the wasps. I was awake through the night counting blood color in multitudes: the color wheel of insomnia. Yesterday, the somber roadkill of summer, the buck draped over the rocks, the birds dipping their heads in and out of the wound: blood kept on beak. Last year, the dog vomiting jelly from his interior.

I lifted him and carried him, his great dog head hung over my shoulder.

He was too big to be an infant so I grew larger to hold him more tenderly, his gums going white which made the night grow pale while I laid him in the car seat next to me. His blood between us was made to sheen from radio light. I am counting the villains on the screen door of home. I am pleading with the night: May that which is leaving be returned to me. I draw bandages across my wall in ocher, hang cotton swabs strung with sutures across my headboard. Under my bed I keep an enamel bowl with a painted green edge for insects. They raise their abdomen first as mothers: the stinger is for laying eggs. The insects and I are constructing a color chart across the ceiling. I am within the nest.

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