by Featured Writer: Deborah Kay Kelly

Deborah Kay Kelly, *Untitled,* ink and watercolor on paper, 2018. Courtesy of the author/artist.

The Ledge

Deborah KAY Kelly | Aug 2022 | Issue 17

I.

I want to lie at the edge of breaking and feel the fragility of air,
how it buoys the light things and parts for the heavy.

That ledge, on which grows one wild strawberry, on which only a dervish could dance,
on which I sit and ponder how much breaking I’d risk by trying to climb up, back
from a verge.

A crack is stalled by whistles of crickets and flutes of grasshoppers. The ledge holds its breath.
Is there a bell for the Sun that announces the resumption of crumbling?

A story in fire’s shadows, I commit to rock. I am derived.
I commit my shoulders and scapulae, the deer-knot, at the base of my spine.

The space between wall and falling is in these lines.

II.

There is much yelling, a president’s pursed beak of a chicken
and a twist of tin ribbon in a critical region
of brain.

He calls for the messianic aestheticians, for a world exfoliated, depilated,
a white egg.

We smell its smolder.

Look at us, grains blown back in the eye of creation.

Our world as snow globe or hourglass. Upturned or shaken.

I wreck the springs on roller shades while there’s time to see, one more time, the alpine,
where no seed sprouts in obsequity, and no cloud sheds poison.
No human tongue and jaw for miles around.

I go where evening is cliff swallows, then cricket whistles,
where air buoys the light things and parts for the heavy, to that ledge,
on which grows
one wild strawberry.

Raised in Minneapolis, a fourth generation on Positively 4th St., Deborah Kay Kelly lived many years in Chicago, and is home in Colorado. Her poems are found, four with award recognition, in several journals based in the US and Europe. She has led and written widely on behalf of non-profit organizations at work in the US and Mexico. Deborah has been published in Isele Quarterly, Asymptote, Thalia Magazine, Alternating Currents , Northern Colorado Writers Anthology, Fourth River Review, Stonecoast Review, The Bombay Gin, and The Art of Fungi Magazine. Several others have appeared in columns by Art Goodtimes in The Telluride Watch.