Kendra DeColo’s Thieves in the Afterlife was selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the 2013 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Southern Indiana Review, Calyx, Best Indie Lit of New England, and elsewhere. A graduate of the M.F.A. program in creative writing at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, she is the recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Tennessee Arts Commission, a work-study scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and residencies from the Millay Colony and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She has taught writing workshops in prisons, middle schools, and homeless shelters.
After Hours, Provincetown Cemetery
Tonight my dead are restless,
reinventing themselves
with names like Glissando
and Surreptitious. I want a tree
to be a tree again, not this trick
of light, chaos of muscle curved
into the neck of a violin.
Autumn welds itself
to the seams of August
and we are saddled by its heat,
the heart of silence
smooth as a gun.
You are somewhere
iridescent and unholy,
sharp horizon of a man,
traveling circus broken
into luminous machinery,
caravan pounding like horses
along the highway. You,
dog-toothed piano,
Queen whose glittered
lashes eat up the dark.
Your words are thumbprints
on the eyelids of the gods.
Your body is the book
I break into, hijacked
of meaning. Your voice,
ejaculation of moonlight,
your speeding ticket sex, gold-veined
heart—tonight you are
my only shelter. I inhabit you
like a squatter, burning my one small light
in this cemetery of thieves.
Copyright (c) 2014 Kendra DeColo. All rights reserved. DeColo will read from Thieves in the Afterlife at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville October 10-12, 2014. All festival events are free and open to the public.
Tagged: Poetry
