By Kelsey Kerin
My rapist on the same road as my mother. Holidays of tender mappings. I steer us to his corner
on the long way to the grocery. Soy on fallow cycle she is dressed in Easter best. His car the color
of a dyed-egg overdipped.
He sells houses on the same road as my mother. Business card at every register in town. A life
shaped out of haunting as in tired heroine as in unmoored from machine of who and how. The
friend who had the same some feet away along the floor.
Men with minds like fly-paper. Speak in flamed-moth. The ends rend means as mundane as a
doorway. Coming and going and going so do mowers motor on. If I am blade of grass I move to
sun I shelter bugs and I cut back—en masse.
This ark and congregation are of iron and everyone’s invited. In arms I venge for nothing but
what’s through. In earthturn I learn forgiveness has no plot. Safe gravities for those in my old
orbit—this is the linchpin legged.
The same road as my mother with my brothers. August hot with anniversaries. The ATV gravel
and clutch I point. Gluttoned to a lovely selfish glow. Here lives some him I used to speak to.
He is no longer my.
Kelsey Kerin is a writer from St. Clair, Michigan. Poems can be found at Protean, Denver Quarterly, Nashville Review, and Midwest Review. Kelsey currently lives in Chicago and is a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
