such earthly delights #4
birdsongs fill your spare bedroom when no one is home
hello,
i forget that i can belong places or i have a place just like my favorite mug has a spot on a shelf or there’s a place for my keys. i was offline and processing horrors and pain and i didn’t get to commiserate my time at peach magazine as a poetry editor with a team of the hardest working angels— you’d assume heaven was empty or full of slackers. rachelle and jakob created something inclusive, diverse, effervescent and kind and i am grateful to have been apart of it in my small way. during the pandemic occasionally i would make it to book clubs with shabby dollhouse— often times so tired and demoralized from working everyday in the grocery store and feeling over socialized but under stimulated and admire the friendship and commitment to the humanities, to their humanities, the refusal to harden under the pressure of a cruel world. peach and shabby doll house and metatron were all presses that dazzled me in my writing infancy— i am sure there are other small presses that predate them but i don’t know if i totally understood the magnitude of sacrifice and dedication required to create a press until i sat on cold nights warmed by the laughter in the group chat with sennah, rachelle, aeon, liz and i catching up and going through hundreds of poems in a night. i am grateful to have had something to add to my epithet— kelly xio, poetry editor at peach mag. i didn’t get a chance to tell you— the internet, anyone who would listen, how grateful i was and am to being in the contagious stratosphere of generosity and creation that held peach mag and our illustrious team of editors and writers but i am. thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.
on al’s couch listening to the bird songs fill his empty house and eat soft, cold, ripe strawberries and imagine a life where the hardest part of my day is that i don’t want to move the cat in my lap to get up and pee.
there’s a point in the poetry show where i break down and say that i emphatically and deeply believe in the work and resilience of people and the incorrigable desire to make this world better than the design and i believe in them like i know the sky is blue and that the ocean is beautiful and tumultuous but there’s single cell organisms that live in the ocean and live in my belly and they’ve lived so much longer than the follies of mankind.
toddler asks me what a soul is and asks if its like a fire— if i pour water on it will it smoke and steam and then go out?
i hold my friend’s baby. her name is dottie and she curls into herself to remain asleep as if she can’t imagine waking when the world isn’t ready— she’s knitting bones and learning to open her eyes while the world is learning new heights and depths of fuckery. she opens her eyes briefly and they’re so shockingly blue. she stares at me and i at her. she closes her eyes and goes back to sleep.
millie’s strawberry shortcake is a delight and flight of whimsy. the crumb of the shortbread is airy, buttery and crisp as if there’s little layers like a croissant. it crumbles and melts in your mouth with the fresh whipped cream and berries.
there are new leaves on all my plants and i mistake their growth for my own.
matthew is running near a field of black and white spotted cows and tiny fluffy lambs that are out to pasture. he sends me a picture of a little lamb, it’s tongue hanging out and its wool tightly coiled. it’s beautiful.
have no pain for three whole days and the body begins to feel intoxicated, almost manic with possibility and liberation. i feel myself making more plans for the future because everything feels good and i can’t imagine a self for a moment that would be condemned to any other fate. i say yes to so many things— let’s make a demo, let’s meet for dinner, let’s go for a hike, let me hold your baby, let me hold your hand. please, please! Let me.
read improvise and riff poems for 90 minutes at enoch pratt library. i hurtled myself down 295 and got to a beautiful building and unzipped my skin and became a voice that sought solace in the presence of others. i felt something move through me— i choked on my regrets and pain and tried to articulate the suffering but i just felt an unusual vaccuum— not the void but joy. there was something in my body that said you were made for this and you are here, you are here and it’s not something i’m used and it’s not something i often expect but saying my words and holding the space with albert making sounds— it felt right. i am fist fighting nihilism and i refuse, i refuse, i refuse to let it have me. i keep thinking i know i was born to do something — even if it’s just to send you weekly lists of mundane articles of my life that give me purpose and hope and meaning— you have a purpose even if it’s just to click through, shake your head and say, oh, that kelly, what is she up to, what ever will she do?
Godspeed,
Kx
poetry rips