Donika Kelly
I am taken with the hot animal
of my skin, grateful to swing my limbs

and have them move as I intend, though
my knee, though my shoulder, though something
is torn or tearing. Today, a dozen squid, dead

on the harbor beach: one mostly buried,
one with skin empty as a shell and hollow

feeling, and, though the tentacles look soft,
I do not touch them. I imagine they
were startled to find themselves in the sun.

I imagine the tide simply went out
without them. I imagine they cannot

feel the black flies charting the raised hills
of their eyes. I write my name in the sand:
Donika Kelly. I watch eighteen seagulls

skim 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 narrow
street I am in love. To the roses, white

petals rimmed brown, to the yellow lined
pavement, to the house trimmed in gold I am

in love. I shout with the rough calculus
of walking. Just let me find my way back,
let me move like a tide come in.
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In summer of 2017, I participated in a workshop at the Fine Arts Work Center led by Gabrielle Calvocoressi. “The moon rose over the bay. I had a lot of feelings.” came out of an exercise Gaby gave us early in the week that involved taking a walk down to the beach and making observations without taking notes.

Donika Kelly on "The moon rose over the bay. I had a lot of feelings."
C. K. Williams, 1986
Alan Shapiro Remembers C. K. Williams

"We were talking about Dante, the end of Canto 4 when Virgil introduces the pilgrim to four of the illustrious poets of antiquity: Homer, Ovid, Horace, and Lucan....I asked Charlie what he thought they might have talked about as they strolled through Limbo. Without hesitating, he said....they talked shop, they talked syllable, pitch and tone, duration, stress and weight, phrasing and timing, formal choices, diction, metaphor, all the subtleties of singing."

via TRIQUARTERLY
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Cover image from Bear Review
What Sparks Poetry:
Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes on Ama Codjoe's "Superpower"

"Each time I read 'Superpower,' I’m astonished by the turns the poem keeps making: from the playful to the horrifying, spanning over a hundred years in a few lines. The poem moves from an imagined fantasy of a superhero, to the folk hero John Henry, to an unnamed enslaved woman, to a (re)imagined memory of the speaker’s mother."
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