Under the AA Meeting
Upstairs mother became invisible,
like God or ghosts or the kind of good
I thought everyone else believed in.
I don’t think I ever talked so much
about what I didn’t understand. My sponsor
had just come back from meeting
the Dalai Lama & was filled with a kind
of quiet only holiness can provide.
When I spoke, my tongue felt numb,
so I burnt it with hot chocolate, let myself
gain a weight of sorrow. Afterwards
we met mother in the lobby of a church
& spoke of nothing, not even the stars.
Things move. People grow old & go
away. They sometimes never come back.
Dear God & Jesus, Virgin Mary & all
the saints, Dear John F. Kennedy & each letter
of a textbook in some other child’s hands,
I always wanted to follow you, slide
spikes-up into second base, hit a home run
my next time at the plate, but I
forget what you’re supposed to mean. My mother
made mac n’ cheese for my brother & I
each time we visited her after she left.
It was the best in the whole world. Now,
when I am sad, I think of driving a car
into a body of water I’ve never seen before,
the rain falling & the sound of someone singing
& the way my loneliness has a name, like an old friend
I haven’t seen in years, but still forever a friend.
Fractions
Nothing simplifies itself. A fraction will stay
at its highest denominator until a little kid slices
a few numbers just for fun. & so tonight,
over the soft meat of a burger with no bun,
my father told me his heart was failing, slowly
slowing down, number by number, to that low
rounded digit no thing can be divided by.
He said there are cures for this & that such cures
will be tried, but cures can fail, & failure can take
a real long time. My brother looked up
from his phone & asked if either of us had seen
the fight between Bryce Harper & Jon Papelbon,
that ex-Red Sock everyone in Washington hates,
& whatever lingered in the air, that stench of death
near putrid & fried, an undercooked chicken tender,
well, it vanished, & I’m on a bus now & the moon
is supposed to be doing something vaguely close
to beautiful, & there are people on roofs in New York
looking up & maybe kissing, but I’m thinking
of someone opening up my father without me there.
The last thing my father said was don’t forget to wash
your clothes & now I’m spelling up a night near two years ago,
taking a girl’s old clothes to a laundromat at half-past
eleven, the day before she left for Central America,
& how I burned through cigarettes under the stars
while her clothes tumbled around, a bunch of panties
I knew & loved, the thin lace of bras, some old shirt
of mine, & tried to casually & without notice snap a photo
of a puppy plodding tenderly behind its owner. It was dark
& the photo came out blurry & most things my father
will never know about me & I have not told him
how much he taught me about love & how scared I am
of failure & how failure, I’ve heard, can take a real long time.
That night, the girl & I ate chips coated with rosemary
& olive oil & she spilled out the just-cleaned contents
of her bag & sat cross-legged on the floor, simplifying.
I knew then it would be possible to love a woman forever.
Most things take a good & honest time & most people
pretend they don’t have time for them. Outside,
the night inks the layered sheets of this earth’s paper
until all is dark save for the dotted yellow tracing out the road.
The moon, too. The stars. I almost forgot. Look up. Pause.
Kiss me. Take your time. Look up. See how they shine.
On the Staten Island Ferry with Your Brother
You board the ferry’s western side, facing
evening, the sun’s blind & colorless gleam
burning up the haze, the aftermath of smog.
You haven’t seen your brother in the longest time –
he stands, eyes brimmed by hat, squinting
toward Liberty. Narrative is like this,
progressing without your knowledge, not even
a plot line, some kind of fault, a cracking
resemblance to quaking, shaking, so that,
when you wake, you have nothing to say
to fill the gap your absence left. Imagine
destruction without violence, morning coming
as a ruin you could walk through, shoving
an entire arm through a window. You’ve spent
years huddled in the fallout shelter, waiting
for a bomb to justify your waiting. You know
you will remember orange, the ferry’s paint,
the reddening landscape of your brother’s arms –
white sand charred to auburn. To your right,
slowly moving away from your brother’s distance,
the tip of city shrinks. Night will come & it will
glisten. Some things are not disturbed
by the potential of disappearance. It takes a mind
to be scared of death. It takes a heart to die.
Your brother turns to you & says I can’t believe
this is free. You’ve passed Lady Liberty. The sun
sulks behind New Jersey & in another direction
the geometry of each bridge intersects the other
until it seems all of humanity travels the same
span of line & triangle, how someone you know
could be out there taking a picture of someone
you know. You want to say what might
bring you closer: I can’t believe it either or I am so in love
right now or do you ever wonder how we are each affected
by all this traveling? Instead you nod, eyes squinted
away, toward a light that neither shines nor shimmers,
only weights the distance, makes real the knowledge
that something lives in air other than air. It’s been
so long & it will be forever longer. Everyone will scatter
like dots on the line of your story. Some will touch
& some will sit beyond registration. This ferry
has a destination. It travels slowly & bellows a horn
when something gets in its way. The city nearly
disappears, but it will get bigger when you return
& then you will be in it & it will be too large
for your body to find in it a home. Your brother
is so close you could reach & hold his hand
without effort. He stares back from where
you came. He is pointing at what remains
of Lady Liberty. Look how small it is, he says.
You nod. Yes, you say, it’s so small. It’s so far away.
Devin Kelly earned his MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and co-hosts the Dead Rabbits Reading Series in New York City. He is the author of the collaborative chapbook with Melissa Smyth, This Cup of Absence (Anchor & Plume) and the books, Blood on Blood (Unknown Press), and In This Quiet Church of Night, I Say Amen (forthcoming 2017, ELJ Publications). He has been nominated for both the Pushcart and Best of the Net Prizes. He works as a college advisor in Queens, teaches at the City College of New York, and lives in Harlem.