Slow To Burn poems by Collin Kelley

Number Four in the Seven Kitchens Press ReBound Series With an introduction by Karen Head

For Tina

Copyright 2014 by Collin Kelley All rights reserved First published in 2006 by MetroMania Press Second edition published in 2011 by Seven Kitchens Press Chapbook design by Ron Mohring and Collin Kelley Seven Kitchens Press P.O. Box 668 Lewisburg, PA 17837 www.sevenkitchenspress.com

Contents Introduction by Karen Head Freedom Train Wonder Woman Ian Double Fantasy Peter Greenaway Duality Laura Brown The Virgin Mary Appears In A Highway Underpass The Clarity of Loss Karaoke for Klaus Barbie NYC Again Muses Are Never Quiet Slow To Burn St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 Bell Curve Ash Wednesday Underneath Put Yourself In My Place What Remains Acknowledgments About the Poet

Introduction In 2010, I was preparing to teach a poetry course, I wanted to select books by living poets who were complex but accessible, contemporary but timeless. Collin Kelleys chapbook, Slow to Burn, immediately came to mind. As with the title of one of the poems, Muses Are Never Quiet, this is not a quiet book. The ending couplet, Even now, my mouth is wet, / my soul singing to itself is a reflection of how this book affects the reader. Some people might try to label this book a work of queer poetry, but that would be unfair and incomplete. This is a book about life, about how each of us experiences loss, experiences exclusion, but ultimately finds our place in the world. In Wonder Woman, Kelley writes: The day I told my parents I wanted to trade in G.I. Joe for Wonder Woman must have set off alarms. In response, one of my students commented, None of us are really what our parents expect. And he was correct. Poems like Wonder Woman and Put Yourself In My Place, anticipate and then reflect upon how we negotiate the process of growing up, learn to accept ourselves and the other people (who are negotiating their own realities) in our lives: Ten years now, I want to say something real, something that puts that one moment in perspective, strips it to non-fiction, absolves you, unlike the others I crucified in words to cleanse myself. This book is important because it exposes the universal struggles we all face. Here is a poet who is considering, in a self-conscious but not self-indulgent way, how to survive in the worlda poet who burns to say something that will resonate with every reader. In the title poem, Kelley writes, I am the flame, laid bare by desire. Put fire in my hands. How often do any of us find someone willing to offer himself so freely? Consequently, Kelleys is a voice that earns our consideration. As Kelley advises Mary in The Virgin Mary Appears In A Highway Underpass, If you want a little respect, come flaming out of the sky on a thunder cloud, ride it like a magic carpet over middle America, speak in a voice like Diana Rigg or Emma Thompson command attention

And, command attention is exactly what Kelley does. Just like its title, this collection is slow to burn, and we should want to see that fire burn for a long time. Be the bellows. Read these poems, and then ride your own thundercloud to share them with others. Karen Head, January 2011

Freedom Train What did we do July 4, 1976? I have no memory of that Bicentennial overload, a hysterical red, white and blue frenzy. We were living in a dark, rented house on the outskirts of town, just a year away from my mothers affair and my fathers blind eye. I was jumping off beds like the Bionic Woman, besotted with Farrahs red bathing suit, wanting to know why Atlanta burned with Gone With the Wind on TV for the first time. Vietnam, Watergate, gas shortages, economic woes totally passed me by. We were poor and living in our own slowly escalating war zone. Mothers brooding unhappiness, Dads work ethic keeping him out of the house and underpaid. What I really remember about that year was wanting to see the Freedom Train. It pulled into rail yards, a traveling museum of Americana. I couldnt tell you the exhibits. I only wanted to see one thing: the ruby red slippers Dorothy wore in The Wizard of Oz. They gleamed like the Hope Diamond under a cheap light bulb. I could have stood there all day, but guides ushered us through, not understanding how much I needed those shoes, to click my way out of the coming storm, the dread I already felt at age six. Maybe we saw fireworks on Independence Day, stood on the sidelines of the pathetic parade that slogged through humidity, led by dispirited baton girls and sweating politicians riding in open cars. Maybe I was looking skyward, waiting for that plume of smoke that would spell doom, like when the Wicked Witch came and wrote words across the horizon: Surrender Dorothy.

Wonder Woman The day I told my parents I wanted to trade in G.I. Joe for Wonder Woman must have set off alarms. I wanted to surrender my guns for the golden lasso, more than the dolls, mind you, I wanted to be Wonder Woman. I dont remember who stitched the costume, blue underwear with glued on stars, a red bustier wrapped around my seven-year-old sunken chest, the golden eagle oddly deflated. The headband and bullet-deflecting cuffs made of cardboard and the length of rope my father had spray-painted gold in the yard hooked at my side. I lassoed my poor dad first, demanded the truth, but there was no magic in those rough, twisted fibers. If the rope could have squeezed out an ounce of what he was really thinking, I would have been dressed up as Superman or Batman, a manly cape flying out behind me as I ran around the back yard, hidden from the neighbors, while my dad devised a way to build Wonder Womans invisible plane.

Ian Before you made me a witch, got forced into the basement to pray, your mother stripping you, whipping you with a belt in those sure Jesus strokes, you kissed me once in the backseat, crouched low, out of my dad's line of sight in the rearview mirror. Then you wrote me a note on scrap paper, scribbled desire in the margins: Ive wanted to kiss you forever. You would burn these words later like a spy. On that sticky summer seat, conjoined twins from brow to ankle bone, this would be the closest we came to merging, you almost 16, me almost 18, and I stepped full grown from the jaws of a college boy who taught me well while he chewed me up and spit me out, made first seduction a blood sport. This was only a test, Ian, to see if I could use my power. Like Valmont, stripping away your virginity, your God blinders. I hooked you on the first cast, reeled you in, left you gasping, until your whispered declarations were intercepted on the downstairs extension. I cannot remember your mother's face. The lashes across your pale skin, the marbled bruises you hid under long sleeves, your cock and balls whipped for their perversion, the gall of their hardening. In the end you would have set me on fire, brainwashed into suburban righteousness, on your knees every night until I was suitably demonized. In the backseat, you kissing me first, those little pink lips ready to renounce the church for one night in the wilderness.

Double Fantasy I found a stack of notes, rubberbanded in the bottom of a box, a one way conversation from a girl who used to sign her name in long blood strokes, fingers pricked and flowing onto white lined paper. Seventeen years later, the rust-colored words could never be mistaken for ink. Youd built a shrine to John Lennon in your closet for dead idol worship, longed for a single bullet to the brain Ill be John and you be Chapman and the dog can be Yoko and the bedroom door is the Dakota. Id pull the trigger, a copy of Double Fantasy under my arm, youd writhe on the carpet, the dog barking in alarm, shrill yaps sounding absurdly like kiss kiss kiss. I have your suicide letters, Aimee, signed from dripping wounds, all that remains of a girl I used to know, who could reel off the rapes and molestation like a documentarian, who gave up her girlfriend for a husband, a safe job, and familial reconciliation, crawled back into the closet with dead John. The last time I saw you, married and pregnant, you said you were the happiest youd ever been. There were band-aids on your fingers and you had on a t-shirt with words written across the back I only noticed after you were walking away: happiness is a warm gun.

Peter Greenaway Our worlds collide over music and poetry. In this too familiar city where I planned suicide and your girlfriend was raped. I lived, you turned to men, almost died. The chemo killing you faster than the cancer. We are both in remission. You love the absurdity and uncertainty of Peter Greenaway films. The changing colors of Helen Mirrens dress, the treachery of numbers and skipping rope, the insanity of architecture. The critics wouldnt understand us either. We are stranger than fiction, we color outside the lines, we speak on the phone long distance as if communicating from different continents. You are further north, closer to London, the place we both agree on. The place we could happily succumb to, the music, literature, cinemas on every corner where we could sit all day. The proximity of our shoulders electric, your hand on my inner thigh the center of the universe. These joys un-numbered, living some other life, answerable only to the whim of fate, giving ourselves up to uncertainty. We get into the leaking boat, row out, taking on water. Holding hands as we slip into the blackness. Cheating death at our leisure, surrendering to that perfect finite weight.

Duality Youve got suicide written all over you: in the way you run hot bath water, in the way you slice bread, in the way you count the pills at night to make sure there are enough. No one understands this war, the way it tastes, like copper pennies in your mouth, like blood. You dont bare any physical scars, not yet. My uncle wanted to die before the disease took hold, while he still had a choice. My best friend swallowed capsules, Shoved them in her mouth like candy until their powder frosted her lips: scream of the siren above, racing back to daylight, men in white saving her from craven darkness. And that girl I knew, whose sister shot herself on the observation deck of the citys tallest building and fell backwards into the wind, because dying once was not enough. I have felt the steering wheel in my chest, the bridge supports ripping me and the car in half. I am already in halves, have always been, will always be. Turn your mirror upon me, my suicide twin. My last words are written on my back, Lurking, peripheral, just behind an unlocked door.

Laura Brown You packed one morning, caught the Toronto bus, disappeared like a chalk mark in a rainstorm. There are two kinds of suicide: the one that leaves you rigored on a slab and the other that keeps you walking like pneumonia, sick to death at the stalemate life has become. The circumstances that brought you here are common: escaping parents, growing up fast, settling for the appearance of a sure thing that is akin to playing the horses. Now all bets are off and suburbia has you in a chokehold. One child shadows you, sensing your need for departure, while another grows inside, willing pills back into bottles, and she wont let you take her down the wrong tunnel. While you seek final synapse fireworks, the baby roils in her dissent. Those kicks say, let me live, then do as you please. One normal morning, husband at work, children at school, house in order, food in the fridge, mad money, a single suitcase, a newspaper with jobs circled clutched in death grip. Sitting on the bus, headed north, you realize there is another kind of suicide. The expatriation of self, the erasing of human traces, letting go of a past you never wanted, circling up into thin air mythology, as if to nothing.

The Virgin Mary Appears in a Highway Underpass Mary pops up in the strangest places, usually as a window stain or sandwich, but yesterday she dripped down the wall of a Chicago underpass, brought the faithful running with candles and offerings, blocked traffic. I saw the pictures, couldnt see her face, saw a giant, gaping vagina instead, just failed my Rorschach Test, going to hell for sure. If this is Mary, she sure gets around, recasting herself as a Holly Golightly, popping up where you least expect her, causing trouble for the locals. Buy why would she choose to appear in condensation, burnt toast or ditch water runoff? Some will say its proof that she still dwells here, runs like an undercurrent, manifests in the mundane. I say, cut the parlor tricks, Mary. If you want a little respect, come flaming out of the sky on a thunder cloud, ride it like a magic carpet over Middle America, speak in a voice like Diana Rigg or Emma Thompson, command attention instead of this sleight of hand, a stain to be cleaned with soap and water, so easily erased.

The Clarity of Loss This year I did not mark the day of your death. I let it slip by in an afternoon filled with music you'll never hear, words you'll never read, a chorus of voices raised in protest at the unwavering passage of time. I don't need a number to know that you are gone. Since you went away, other tragedies have left their toll, the media mining the fragile, the exhaustion, the relentless sorrow of things we cannot change. We have made high art out of twisted cars, planes crashing, buildings falling. I have dissected my past into little pieces and put them in their proper places. I have begun the process of growing up and older, of stripping down memories to their essence and casting off the extraneous. Even without a calendar, we will be born and die, clock work beyond our control. And there is a clarity in loss because it reveals the true path, the one common experience, the thing we all share. You have died and I will join you, and time, which we have enslaved ourselves to, will snap, and in whatever an instant is, it will be as if we never parted.

Karaoke For Klaus Barbie I spend New Years Eve with a lesbian Oompa Loompa, her Napoleon Complex unable to mask her lack of bartending skills. She rips my leather jacket while smoking a joint on the deck, and I find the damage later, but Tina tells me to say nothing. Its a way to keep the peace, to make sure the freebie dinners and promotions keep coming. So I keep quiet, because Tina needs that job, must learn to float in an ocean just as treacherous as the teaching gig she gave up for a married woman with kids, the husband immortalizing her in the divorce papers as a threat to public morals. We sing karaoke at the front door, our arms loaded down with coats and leftovers. Munchkin floats on top of a bean bag chair, Screaming we suck for leaving before board games, cranks up the music and swings the microphone like a lasso in our direction. Boss Lady has half the room under her thumb like a miniature Klaus Barbie, and if they dont sing one more round of Ive Got Friends in Low Places shell send them right to the showers.

NYC Again The old man smokes his cigar, jaws with his buddies on the E. 31st stoop, laughs at the poor out-of-town bastard who stops his giant SUV instead of going around the stinking garbage truck, gets a dozen honks for his politeness. New York is back, cast off its widows weeds. Girls are wearing short skirts, talking on cell phones, lines around the block for films and art, poetry is all sex and politics, and kids speeding on cocktails of the latest pills will mow you down in the street. Sobrietys in the backseat, and the hookers smile like they mean it. I sit at a bar deep in the Village, a glass of wine warming in my hand, doors open to the sidewalk, dark at 6 p.m. as a storm moves over Manhattan. Even the rain seems perfect again.

Muses Are Never Quiet

For Cherryl Floyd-Miller

I woke up looking for my old muses, two women, one silently plotting her return, the other gone to repose. Woke up, mouth drenched with the need to sing them back. This morning I needed Lauryn Hill, Ready or not, here I come you cant hide, gonna find you and make you want me. Tonight I need Nina Simone, Black is the color of my true loves hair And I get a reminder by mail that these muses arent quiet, theyre always on, humming subsonic, and if I listen carefully, Ill still be able to hear Ninas rings tapping on the piano keys, Lauryn do-woppin on a summer NYC corner afternoon, better than a Supreme. I turn out the lights, match strike flame shimmer dancing in summer heat, like Mississippi (goddamn). Candle wax conjuring, bringing those women back into my life, those songs filling me with these words, the admonition to move forward, and look back only when I need reminding why I wrote this in the first place. Even now, my mouth is wet, my soul singing to itself.

Slow To Burn I am slow to burn, waiting for a match strike, the long drag against me, catching sparks. See the way my toes curl, surrounded by faggots like Saint Joan on her worst day. Retardant long enough for roll call, the names who slapped heresy into me. This is for the poets who have lost touch with the microphone, suck life out of classrooms, assassinate wild voices, close doors. Take your little birds and give me vultures. I want to see what made you hungry, when words were a jugular spray unstaunched by tenure and jockeying for invisible position, before you were warned that exposing a soft underbelly was career suicide. Lets get this blaze roaring. Kindle me up, boys. Throw on your booze, three pack a day habit, incest, Oedipal complexes, failed marriages, homosexuality, war, peace, cancer. Really stoke me. Even when love has carved you more expertly than a serial killer, those words dont fit your pages. Turn back to prosaic flowers and landscapes while I immolate myself. I am the flame laid bare by desire. Put fire in my hands.

St. Louis Cemetery No. 1

New Orleans

Let tall grass grow where your heart used to beat. Wind and water is other world, immaterial in alabaster mansions, souls just out of reach. Heat never dries the ground here, just bones. We reconstitute at night as saints and haints, loosed from our bags of flesh and out over the ramparts. Storms come and go, along with disease, they lined us along the levees in fever years. City of despairing angels, this storm will pass, give us your sons and daughters, keep your guns and watches, we all lay back in darkness. We laugh at dirt and damp, trying to reach up and claim its prize.

Acid Flashback #1
for Billy

The first time I dropped acid, mistaking a Johnnie Walker Black billboard for Joanne Whalley-Kilmer straddling a chair like in the poster for Scandal, you couldnt see it, even after we pulled over on the expressway down near the airport. How the soft gold of the striding man logo had morphed into arms and legs akimbo in the rising heat just before twilight. I tried to explain Christine Keeler, how she brought down the British government with her showgirl appeal, accused of being a spy, sleeping with the Muscovites, the intricacies and absurdities of the Profumo Affair, how sex and friendship can turn on a dime. You told me I was too old for you, I was a show off, ruining your drugs with my ancient history, the way I lorded my high school education over you. Your words tipped us into cold war, smoke-screened the wall you were building all year, preparing to sacrifice me over the three years that separated our births, making me a casualty of your zeitgeist. John Profumo was the last Secretary of State for War, a position now made obsolete, struck off, as if battle plans would never be needed again.

Bell Curve The first night Tina called, our junior year of high school, Thursday out of the blue. She had already decided I was her project, to be reshaped and reformatted. It was part of her good works clause. She was going to right my sinking ship, get me out of brown belts and blue jeans, punk my hair. I wore a long black coat, lost weight, listened to Depeche Mode, smoked cigarettes, shoplifted like one of Charlie Mansons girls. My mother hated Tina, called her bad influence. She didnt make me gay, as my father surmised but she helped take the hinges off the door. She taught me invaluable lessons of bad driving, not giving a damn what others think, and that heartbreak can make you howl. No matter how far you get away from high school, first love leaves you marked like holy water across the face. It is a brutal exorcism from innocence and those who tell you otherwise are liars. I still remember that night we snuck into her first girlfriends room, scented like patchouli and Kate Bushs face glowing in the dark. I listened to their voices rise and fall, the interminable silences, quiet in my own corner. Devastated by the world Tina had opened up for me, unsure whether to thank her or tear out her throat. We have come apart more times over the years than I can count, but always righted ourselves. Like the married couple we promised to be in case of an emergency. In case the howls and devastation were too much for either of us to bear.

Ash Wednesday
for Beth Gylys

Beth's porcelain forehead is smudged with a priest's faded fingerprint, as if she were a turned page, the sins of Tuesday flipped to penitence. She reads a poem about Madonna, who lost her religion years ago, dabbles in others for the perfect fit, some organization to contain her oversized soul. It's 4702 by the Chinese calendar, so happy new year. I'm no spring chicken, not even a rooster, but I've been called a cock a time or two. I died in a dream this morning, my car skidding on ice, going over a guardrail, my arms spread wide, my mouth an O in the rearview mirror, my chest tight, heart in spasm, then defibrillated by waking. They've painted over the red walls in Tina's old fifth floor apartment, a flat white, taking the blood out. Careers and tears came and went, along with a line of dancing girls who had no rhythm. No good memories linger here, and I'm moving soon. As I'm putting up a poetry flyer on the lobby bulletin board, deciding what to give up for Lent, the pushpin sticks my thumb, white lines smeary with ink, almost breaks the skin, almost bleeds.

Underneath The goal is this: touch the underside of Pont Neuf, the oldest part of Paris. Scrape my knuckles until they bleed, leave a stain high above the water line, a marker for future reference, my expatriation graffiti, safe from tide and wake. Send photos of my scars back to you, proof of life. I am on the boat now.

Put Yourself In My Place

for Bo

Ten years now, I want to say something real, something that puts that one moment in perspective, strips it to non-fiction, absolves you, unlike the others I crucified in words to cleanse myself. And like some tabloid cover story, you have disappeared, dropped out of airspace, off my long-damaged radar. Maybe you knew all along, those days in Paris when we were do close you almost let yourself splinter, told me stay near, that it was so easy to get lost in a crowd, to lose sight. Did you keep the poems I gave you that day in the restaurant parking lot, exchanging property like a divorce. Those small words, scratches at the surface, are nothing to the pages written over the last decade, where Ive deconstructed us and those weeks, put them back together, and yet the ending remains unhappy. I cant lie, cant send us floating along the Seine into the sunset. My primitive detective skills have sought you out, but maybe not hard enough, maybe keystrokes cant match old-fashioned gumshoe. If I cant walk the walk, Ill create the talk, so maybe it will reach the corner where you are. Someone will turn and say, Havent you heard? and youll find these words to transport you back to that first London morning, when we sat on a cold stone floor in a hotel lobby at 9 a.m., out of our heads, out of this world; you held out a hand, then the fireworks.

What Remains We arrived in Paris on a rainy Sunday, I remember this now, as I lift the veil you shrouded me in, made me complicit in your indecision. While the others walked under umbrellas, we lay on opposite beds in the Marais, our hands reaching across the chasm, my fingertips tracing your open palm, every line a dead end. We made love through a litany of favorite things: films as foreplay, music for kisses, books our orgasm, a rush of words safe between hard covers. We should have been covered in sweat, sticky with the unspoken, a tangle of limbs and lips. We are those people in an alternate world, where hallway voices hold no sway. I remember this now: your eyes before the door opened, broke the spell. Your hand moving away, all the lines suddenly on fire, a map gone to cinder. This ephemeral day, even the afterglow.

Acknowledgments This chapbook would not exist without Tanya Keyser and MetroMania Press, which published the first limited edition in 2006. I met Tanya in 2005 at the Austin International Poetry Festival and was blown away by the beautiful chapbooks she was creating for new and upcoming poets. A few months after the festival, I emailed Tanya and asked if she would be interested in reading the manuscript that became Slow To Burn. A year later, MetroMania published the chapbook. Tanyas support and encouragement made the publication one of the most positive experiences Ive had as a writer. Thank you, Tanya. These poems were shepherded by Cecilia Woloch, Tania Rochelle, Beth Gylys, Jackie Sheeler and Cherryl Floyd-Miller, while Karen Head and Kate Evans honored me by teaching the book in their college classrooms. Many thanks to Vanessa Daou for inspiring the title and for her beautiful music, which continues to thrill and inspire me. And thanks to Ron Mohring and Seven Kitchens Press for keeping the fire burning a little longer.

About Collin Kelley Collin Kelley is the author of the novels Conquering Venus and Remain In Light, which have just been re-issued in new editions by Sibling Rivalry Press. Remain In Light was the runner-up for the 2013 Georgia Author of the Year Award in Fiction and a 2012 finalist for the Townsend Prize for Fiction. His poetry collections include Better To Travel (2003, iUniverse), Slow To Burn (2006, MetroMania Press), After the Poison (2008, Finishing Line Press) and Render (2013, Sibling Rivalry Press), chosen by the American Library Association for its 2014 Over the Rainbow Book List. Kelley is also the author of the short story collection, Kiss Shot (2012, Amazon Kindle Exclusive). A recipient of the Georgia Author of the Year Award, Deep South Festival of Writers Award and Goodreads Poetry Award, Kelleys poetry, essays and interviews have appeared in magazines, journals and anthologies around the world. For more, visit www.collinkelley.com. About Karen Head Karen Head is the author of Sassing (WordTech Press, 2009), My Paris Year (All Nations Press, 2009) and Shadow Boxes (All Nations Press, 2003). Her poetry has appeared in journals around the world. She is Assistant Professor and Director of the Communication Center at the Georgia Institute of Technology.