ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Devin Kelly earned his MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and co-hosts the Dead Rabbits Reading Series in New York City. He is the author of the collaborative chapbook with Melissa Smyth, This Cup of Absence (Anchor & Plume) and the books, Blood on Blood (Unknown Press), and In This Quiet Church of Night, I Say Amen (forthcoming 2017, ELJ Publications). He has been nominated for both the Pushcart and Best of the Net Prizes. He works as a college advisor in Queens, teaches at the City College of New York, and lives in Harlem.
New Interpretations of Faith
There's a woman on the block who signs
herself each time she passes the church,
stride unbroken, gaze cross-bound, toward wood
& snare of binding.
*
Sometimes the moon wakes naked up the night,
finds its rest of skin-shine & bone at the top
of a mountain cloaked in dark.
*
I am so much blood inside. Rivers turn
through tissue. There is no light there.
It must be joyous at skin break, rupture
as a kind of dawn.
*
I drink wine now & think of transubstantiation,
mulling my tongue along its roof
to taste for iron. I want to be
stronger, the good book's binding
before it opens. If I am read, I long
to be read well.
*
We say the heart has chambers & we let
people live inside. When we die, they climb
out our mouth & stitch it closed
with eyelash & silk, ash of skin & dust.
*
There is language here. Light as both
verb & noun. The wake of world
as the first breath of morning
& the gathering before its funeral.
*
There's a man poking a hole into a slice
of bread, he says, to make a bagel.
What we know can be given different names.
There's a cross. There's a cross of wood.
There's a cross between who you are
& who you want to be. You sit alone
to decide the rest of your life. Outside
a woman crosses toward a cross
where she says someone let their body
die & we came pouring out.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
