Kelly Gray

Luscus

All summer I wear a sweater. There is a darkness
leaving that makes me cold. In the morning
my stomach sours till I gag on petunias;
their faces are killing me.
When I cry I feel relief, so instead I hold out
to buy new knives & hope they rust
like the spotted blades we used
for years. He filleted the lamb, I picked apples and sage
from the garden. Now, I wander this savage domesticity
on my own. It is an empty space made of sooted walls
and dimly lit conquests in oil. Lamps and lamps
and one shard of sun through the skylight,
day after day it streaks my right eye into blindness.
Parts of my body fall off, roll down the hill and are gone.

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Kelly Gray's poetry has been featured on The Slowdown Podcast with Maggie Smith, Poetry Daily and has been published in or is forthcoming from Ploughshares, Boulevard, AGNI, New Letters, ZYZZYVA and Salt Hill Journal, among other places. She is author of Instructions for the Animal Body (Moon Tide Press, 2021), The Mating Calls //of the// Specter (Tusculum Review Chapbook Prize, 2023), Our Sodden Bond (MAYDAY Chapbook Prize, 2025) and Dilapitatia (Moon Tide Press, 2025). Gray lives with her daughter in a cabin in the woods and in addition to her four other jobs, teaches poetry in rural public schools.