I am taken with the hot animalof my skin, grateful to swing my limbsand have them move as I intend, thoughmy knee, though my shoulder, though somethingis torn or tearing. Today, a dozen squid, deadon the harbor beach: one mostly buried,one with skin empty as a shell and hollowfeeling, and, though the tentacles look soft,I do not touch them. I imagine theywere startled to find themselves in the sun.I imagine the tide simply went outwithout them. I imagine they cannotfeel the black flies charting the raised hillsof their eyes. I write my name in the sand:Donika Kelly. I watch eighteen seagullsskim 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 narrowstreet I am in love. To the roses, whitepetals rimmed brown, to the yellow linedpavement, to the house trimmed in gold I amin love. I shout with the rough calculusof walking. Just let me find my way back,let me move like a tide come in.
The moon rose over the bay. I had a lot of feelings.
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- May 20, 2021
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“The moon rose over the bay. I had a lot of feelings.” from The Renunciations.
Copyright © 2021 by Donika Kelly.
Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org
Ladan Osman
Donika Kelly is the author of The Renunciations and Bestiary, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and a founding member of the collective Poets at the End of the World, and her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and Foglifter. She is an assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Iowa, where she teaches creative writing.
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