Donika Kelly Poems

The war was all over my hands.
I held the war and I watched them
die in high-definition. I could watch

anyone die, but I looked away. Still,
I wore the war on my back. I put it
on every morning. I walked the dogs

and they too wore the war. The sky
overhead was clear or it was cloudy
or it rained or it snowed, and I was rarely

afraid of what would fall from it. I worried
about what to do with my car, or how
much I could send my great-aunt this month

and the next. I ate my hamburger, I ate
my pizza, I ate a salad or lentil soup,
and this too was the war.

At times I was able to forget that I
was on the wrong side of the war,
my money and my typing and sleeping

sound at night. I never learned how
to get free. I never learned how
not to have anyone's blood

on my own soft hands.
...

I've been thinking about the anatomy
of the egg, about the two interior membranes,

the yolk held in place by the chalazae, gases
moving through the semipermeable shell.

A curious phrase, the anatomy of the egg,
as if an egg were a body, which it is,

as if the egg could be broken then mended,
which, depending on your faith, broken yes,

but mended? Well. Best to start
again, with a new body, voided

from a warmer one, brooded and turned.
Better to begin as if some small-handed

animal hadn't knocked you against a rock,
licked clean the rich yolk and left

the albumen to dry in the sun — as if a hinged
jaw hadn't swallowed you whole.

What I wanted: a practice that reassured
that what was cracked could be mended

or, at least, suspended so that it could not spread.
But now I wonder: better to be the egg or scaled

mandible? The small hand or the flies, bottle black
and green, spilling their bile onto whatever's left,

sweeping the interior, drinking it clean?
I think, something might have grown there, though

I know it was always meant to be eaten,
it was always meant to spoil.
...

I am not land or timber
nor are you
ocean or celestial body,

but rather we are
the small animals
we have always been.

The land and the sea
know each other
at the threshold

where they meet,
as we know something
of one another,

having shown,
at different times,
some bit of flesh,

some feeling.

We call the showing
knowing instead of practice.
We seem to say,

at different times,
A feeling comes.

What is the metaphor
for two animals
sharing the same space?

Marriage?

We share a practice,
you and I,
a series of postures.

Here is how I
become a tree
[ ]

and you
[ ]
a body in space.
...

The tide pool crumples like a woman
into the smallest version of herself,
bleeding onto whatever touches her.

The ocean, I mean, not a woman, filled
with plastic lace, and closer to the vanishing
point, something brown breaks the surface—human,

maybe, a hand or foot or an island
of trash—but no, it's just a garden of kelp.
A wild life.

This is a prayer like the sea
urchin is a prayer, like the sea
star is a prayer, like the otter and cucumber—

as if I know what prayer means.

I call this the difficulty of the non-believer,
or, put another way, waking, every morning, without a god.

How to understand, then, what deserves rescue
and what deserves to suffer.

Who.

Or should I say, what must
be sheltered and what abandoned.

Who.

I might ask you to imagine a young girl,
no older than ten but also no younger,
on a field trip to a rescue. Can you

see her? She is lead to the gates that separate
the wounded sea lions from their home and the class.
How the girl wishes this measure of salvation for herself:

to claim her own barking voice, to revel
in her own scent and sleek brown body, her fingers
woven into the cyclone fence.
...