3 Poems
by Emily Van Kley
1.
I am ravenous for the indistinct,
that way my hunger keeps.
Outside, the tulips promised
black emerge lick-red,
gnarled, as if the insides
of bodies were meant
for display, as if I wanted
something regular as bleeding.
2.
With me you’ll never
have to have big feelings again
says the lover on the TV show
I watch with my sister-in-law.
She’s trying not to drink.
I’m trying to detest
myself less. The sky
keeps smacking its face
blue, then heaving down
another bruising of water.
3.
Maybe the best love is numb.
The sublime always returns
to form. Stars burn to death
over time so immense
we measure it as distance.
Rain hardens to hail,
pinging wild off sidewalks
& windshields;
seconds later it’s slush
slumped in the gutter.
4.
I stay panicked, hapless
with permissions. A friend
tells me rituals of blood-letting
could help. Is anything
so euphoric as touch,
so honed to dismember?
5.
My blooms darken
as they grow: carmine,
burgundy, never quite
obsidian. I only wanted
them to cup night
while its essence fled, hold me
still so I could see into
the nothing I pinprick.
7.
The bulb nourishes itself.
I’ll keep living
until I collide
with something vaster.
Quintessence
Attention is dangerous—it has brought you to this despair
—Kazim Ali
Loves,
it doesn’t bear
repeating. The frenzied
division, our dust
storm arrival. How alone
we are, dismantling
need into word.
Only yesterday,
the great plates fissured.
The sea split into oceans.
Estrangement
surfaced.
Attention is dangerous,
so I will hold yours
while the sun touches
clouds to pieces,
while unknown particles
scare like schools of fish
through our scant spaces.
We’re moving apart
at incredible speeds—or collapsing
together.
Is there a difference?
Draw the line, call a shape
from the ether.
What occupies us is so
much stranger than skin.
Hunting Season (Umbria)
I.
Apertura della caccia:
it’s a cloudless, insane
day for a stroll. Every grove
between farms bristles
with munitions.
In borrowed blaze,
my parents and I wind
through sunflower fields,
their cycloptic throng.
Rifles cackle. We shout
to categorize our sound
making as human. One shot
explodes so close
we duck, rush past figs
the trees weep roadside.
We stop at a cemetery,
slip inside its high
stone walls. Here, crypts
of candied cement lean
slow, unfazed by garish
cycles of hunter, prey.
No one is shooting
at us. We rest a while, unscathed among corpses.
II.
By night, mercy, guns
doze in steel cabinets.
The hillside seeps quiet.
Surviving boar forage.
On my back in the grass
I yield to the mute
violence of meteors rubbing
out against atmosphere.
Now and again a dog
howls somewhere
in an outdoor pen,
still in a rapture
of seeking and finding,
as if all matter
were in danger of slipping
into some far dimension
and must be called back
with a strong voice.
Emily Van Kley
Emily Van Kley is a queer poet and circus artist currently based in Olympia, Washington. Her poetry collections are The Cold and the Rust (2018), winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize, and Arrhythmia (2022), both from Persea Books. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry and Best New Poets, and has received the Loraine Williams Prize for Poetry, the Iowa Review Award, and the Florida Review Editor’s Award among other honors. When not writing, Emily can often be found teaching or performing aerial acrobatics.