Kelly Canaday
Half Life
What I have left are
gardens and golden circles,
the voices of these people stained with
an answer prayed in the wrong way.
They try but can’t yet hear
the wind coming in the distance like the sea.
Thank you for building me so in the sky that I might
roll beyond the window and
into the next color of this life,
gracing a more delicate view.
Down the street I see patterns—high beams
in sunset—
it took this night
to give it all quietly.
Communion
I am waiting for her to tuck me in at night.
We’ll go down to the cypress trees lit by fireflies.
My mother left on the soft pink light
but it’s my grandmother’s blood that flows firm into mine.
Thank God I am torn in this mountainous land—
torn so far from who I’ve been.
My words cannot churn the way theirs can,
for I am a poet only in breath.
Wait for Breath
1.
It is all holy. It is always raining.
Grown on suspended culture—it is important to reduce.
Shot overhead, a million stars judge
our texts and emergency calls, and you from your seat
in the auditorium hoping for a familiar narration.
Wax figures melt into a mold and encase a millennium.
There’s no replacing the honest present.
Not even the past can be outshone in the darkest
Embellishments are nothing when held to the side of your face.
I love you enough to trust the facts, to hold myself to an advantage.
I think I’ve gathered enough data to step into my future.
Your shadow on my skin I cannot
hold you like a stone, hold you the way
this room is hollow and the dark blue sky taps into bone.
2.
I show you my family tree
and we found ourselves in Kentucky wanting more.
It is all holy. It is not mine to reduce.
Drinking Jim Beam and closing the shutters before dawn
Before the storm could reach the sycamore tree and
my father could dream of bioluminescence on the beach.
On the sand we drown.
In the light we see.
Singularity
1.
Beyond ideas of right
and wrong, there is a field. There is a
boardwalk, there is more time.
You’re thrown out of your glass,
You’re elsewhere.
I want you to be the one
to save me from the radio tower.
I want you to see how I fly
in my sleep. Life is a fight
whether you hit back or not.
Confide in me.
2.
You only have to see yourself
the same as when you were young.
3.
If you didn’t find love from it
what did you find.
If you didn’t find love from it
what did you find.
And now the loneliness—
you know you don’t need words,
you know it’s soma
and it’s coming for you. There is no
trace of your words here. I am
a doll, sitting in the church of poetry.
The House of Women
I was in a house of women where nothing that was done was premeditated. We took too long to pick up cereal at the grocery store, and we shared the names of our middle school crushes, some of whom are dead now. We stole crayons from the library’s children’s section and watched new turtles in the fish tank replace the old. We leaned back on stone pillars and invented life stories for strangers on the street corner. We saw our biggest fears reflected in their eyes. A man that smelled of death turned right onto Ludlow Street as the crayons melted in our hands into a sort of billowy perfume that could span generations. We stitched our pain into a fabric of sacred geometry that answered every prayer from our mothers in small bursts of electric ink. Everything starved grew wings. Everything stolen was returned, and we politely met it all at the bottom of the stream.
About the Author
Kelly Canaday is a poetry student. Her inspiration ranges from people-watching in Florida to quantum mechanics, and her work appears in NPR, Into the Void, and the American Journal of Poetry, among others.