Collin Kelley

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Incantation

Take an airport parking slip,
mix with boarding pass,
sprinkle with train ticket
add hotel room key,
stir in phone messages,
simmer with postcards.
Take scrap talismans
and inhale deeply.
Now say London.
Repeat until ephemera reshapes,
turns into a paper airplane
big enough to lift you
over the sea.
​

Victoria Gate  ☊

Maybe she was crying before she got on the coach at Marble Arch, settled in the seat across from me, but by the time we reach Victoria Gate, tears stream down her face, mouth open to receive her own sacrament.
 
Indian, ageless in tasteful floral, a blue sweater despite summer heat, an iPod clutched
in her hand. Traditional music bleeds from earbuds, then shifts to Bollywood techno beat.
And still she cries. Along Bayswater Road, her glassy eyes reverential, meeting her gaze feels like blasphemy. Who is she missing or mourning, or maybe it’s what – her own bed, mother’s cooking, stillness.
 
London is short on sympathy when it comes to heartbreak and homesickness, not so subtly tells you to walk it off. But sometimes at night when you’re riding past Hyde Park and dusky silhouettes arm-in-arm are framed by bus windows, a familiar song can collapse resolve, make you reach for the red hammer over your seat to crack the escape glass. Then unbuckle and rise through the treetops until the lamp at Victoria Gate is a pinprick, insignificant, up to the stratosphere where equilibrium inverts and tears become the stars that will guide you home.
​

Atonement  ☊

I am sitting in a London cinema watching Vanessa Redgrave make amends for a life of deceit, to a soundtrack of rushing water I believe subliminal, to drive home melancholy, but when silhouetted heads turn in search, I realize it is real. It is raining hard outside, echoing behind the screen, and suddenly your death comes rushing back to me, Christopher, who I have not mourned.

Fifteen years ago we watched Vanessa give away Howards End, thrilled at elegant despair and handwringing, the way the rain never looked ugly there, was always just enough and never too much. When our sweaty young palms found each other’s in the dark, our dreams came in fast whispers, the promise that we would go to London one day.

I am here now, Christopher, and I feel you near. I am writing these words for you in Leicester Square, the English rain cold and perfect on my skin, yet the ink does not smear. You will not let me forget so easily, although I have tried to make you a stranger, a casualty of your own vices.

My fear is that I passed you on the street, when you were homeless and addicted, unrecognizable ghetto scarecrow, invisible and all the same, part of the city landscape. Maybe you were behind the gas station in a cold sweat, shooting meth to forget the HIV shame. Swallowed up in pride.

Your death is a voice mail, left by another with a phone number. The somber tone is unmistakable, a hush earmarked for the dead. Four days gone – long enough to have shaken off flesh gravity – I expect your ghost to rattle the unearthly chains of your discontent. Even when I skip the memorial, numb on the couch as twilight approaches, picking the memory of you like a scab, I realize that you are not so much a wound, but a scar that will never fade.

But today, you come back as the sound of rain; fill me up like a bucket until I brim. Not a dry eye in the house, anyway. So clever, you, subtle and un-paranormal. I mourn you with celluloid, Christopher, with dark rooms where stories unfurl, with rushing water, with a city that pulls me near and pushes me away, with clocks that always know the score.
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            Render ☊
                    --for Sally Mann

            Take a glass plate and clean it well
            In the light, fill the center with collodion
            Tilt until it reaches each corner
            Pour the excess back in the bottle

Your darlings are poison –
candy cigarette daughter
another hung from a tree
son waist deep in rising water –
they float in mercury time

            Take the plate into a dark place
            Immerse in silver nitrate 
            Dry off the backside and load it into a dark slide
            Place into the camera and expose

In the back of your truck
hands become stained, toxic
outside is Antietam night
where collodion once held wounds
ground exhales the centuries
the moon turns silver to blood

            Develop using a ferrous sulfate
            Fix the plate with potassium cyanide

Decomposing body
eye socket and earth merge
skin a leather handbag
jawbone and cheek dust 
pillow for the dead head
in brutal Knoxville heat

            Time is essential in wet-plate photography
            Move quickly to a portable darkroom
            Rinse the plate in fresh water then dry
            Varnish with sandarac, alcohol and lavender oil

And the children again, older
freckled lunar landscapes 
postmortem stillness 
the boy’s eyes fixed and dilated 
three perfect funeral masks

            Note that a blue sky and clouds are impossible to render
            Expect imperfections and subtle debris

Looking for Pee Wee

While I’m drooling on my pillow,
deep in 3 a.m. dreams,
Pee Wee is at work breaking into
cars in the parking deck.

The warnings come every week,
folded paper slipped under door:
Remove all objects of value,
especially stereos, CDs, loose change,
navigation systems.

One night I left my door unlocked
and Pee Wee spent the night rifling
through fast food bags, insurance cards,
unspooling tapes worth nothing.
I felt I’d let Pee Wee down.

He’s a black male, 40s, only 5’6.
I’m advised to call 911 if I see
anyone matching his description.
Don’t worry about mistaken identity,
it’s better to err on the side of caution.

Pee Wee is a known petty thief,
and now every black man along
Highland Avenue looks tiny.
I chant his name at the shoeless,
the rag men, the backs of children.
Sometimes he works with a female,
a girl Friday, a lookout.
She’s 4’0, wears wigs, maybe 13,
maybe Pee Wee’s daughter.

              ❦

​Collin Kelley's profile

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English Pastoral  ☊

Oxford summer
the cottage doors 
open to the garden
where wood pigeons coo
& distant laughter drifts
over the garden wall
I sit at the end of a long table
paper rustling in the breeze 
watch a butterfly flutter in
float over the forget-me-nots
time stops, freeze idyllic
electric blue sky tufted 
with motionless cotton wool
the city in my head goes mute
as I succumb to countryside 
content with birds & breeze 

Knoxville: Summer, 1982 ☊

100 degrees at the World’s Fair
the Sunsphere shimmers
a giant lollipop that loses
its flavor in one lick.

We sit in a cheap motel room
flipping through unfamiliar TV
our sweat-soaked clothes
stiffening in the over-chilled air.

No one speaks.

Her abandoned lover 236 miles away
my mother watches the phone
a pot that will never boil again
reaches for it, then withdraws.

Back home, Bruce jerks off
without me in his dark basement
fantasizes about cocktease Karen
decides my hand is not enough.

Dad wants to see the body farm
bones picked clean of worries
free of cheats, brats and bills
his 43rd birthday goes unmentioned.

That night I dream the Sunsphere
is a Magic 8 Ball in my hand
I shake it hard, but the same message
always floats to the surface:

better not tell you now.

At Lake Forest Plaza

            –      East New Orleans

The hotel is a skeleton,
whitewashed ribs, its name a shadow
etched into the wall like nuclear flash.
Read Blvd. is just one ground zero,
I-10 a gallery of ruin.
My memory is long.

I came here on the run from Chris,
when he was alive and crazy,
unwinding the double helix of us,
embarrassed by his public madness.
I wanted to sweat him out anonymously,
heat cure for lingering malady.

I could only afford the outskirts,
but I had memorized the map
so Canal, Vieux Carre, Carondelet,
St. Charles, Garden District
were second tongue, steeped
in Tennessee, Truman, Ignatius
and Julie Marsden in a red dress
at the Olympus Ball.

This is 1992, dumplin', 1992, not the Dark Ages.

I learned to acclimate, even found
charm in the Lake Forest Plaza Mall,
its food court a cheap haven,
when I could find pleasure in nothing.
Chris and money burning holes
in my pockets, finally going for broke –
Maison Blanche, mon amour.

On TV, helicopters hovered
over the flooded mall, waist deep
black water, tattered roof waving
white flags and although it had been
10 years since I’d set foot there,
my hand traced the places
where I’d walked to shake Chris off.

I should have called him then,
when he was alive and not crazy.
I know that now, driving past the place
where the mall used to stand, swept
off the earth as if some angry god’s hand
descended and cleared a table.

Xenomorphs

After break up and make up,
my parents took me to see Aliens.
R rated treat for being a brave little soldier.
No xenomorphs could match
the double-jawed bite and acid tongue
of my mother and father in protracted battle.
I had put myself in stasis
to stop my chest from bursting.

As the reel unfurled Ripley’s nightmare,
I shed another layer of skin,
put one foot in the aisle,
white-knuckled the armrests for dust off.
Every man for himself.
I was almost sixteen.
The space between us would be vast.

cleanskin

UK police term for a person who does not match expected terrorist profiles

When shoplifting is no longer a thrill,
turn your attention to heaven,
the promises of gold, riches and girls
all waiting on the other side.
Set aside chemistry, child rearing and cricket
for they are false prophets, western sirens.

They carry rucksacks into King’s Cross,
these clean boys, these untouched boys,
these led astray, almost men.
Dirty yourself once and glory is forever.
Your names will be on every television,
put fellow passengers out of mind,
their flesh the only barrier to your reward.

What’s left of the corporeal will splatter
on train carriage walls or fly hot-baked
into the buildings around Tavistock Square.
Oh, boys, the ones who sent you here
will not tell you this finality, that you become
residue that scatters in the wind or settles
in gutters, not heavy enough to rise.

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