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Leap/ Bound
Of the dress, the woman at checkout said you're one of those people who can wear yellow, latest in a lifetime of things I didn't know were a thing. The sun's rays hung like straw between buildings. You took my hand and we beetled though the heat. At the brewery, quickly tipsy, we said we never notice how much older we’re getting except in photos we look so young. Remember the plumb bob faces behind which we felt unlovely? Now, we could care less, but not much less, which we wouldn't have predicted. We order salad, let the afternoon go to our heads. * * * The summer I lived on the plains I liked to watch pronghorn, their flanks sunset parfait, their exclamatory antlers. I felt the way I imagined they did: bored but not unpanicked. Time was always sharpening its claws in the tall grass, my eyes set for distance over detail. The same morning poison oak's invisible-ink oaths began to raise cain on our ankles, my girlfriend pointed; an owl as broad as I was tall hurled itself silently overhead. She was a woman I loved until I didn't, which is what happened before you, darling, every time. So tell me, what are our chances? Our romance at times exigent––we furnish each other, we latch and bramble–– while I’m as inordinate as ever (in that respect unlikely to improve with age). So far last light’s a habit we love to succumb to, brace our bodies for the next inevitable. You gather my hand to the noise of your chest. |
Savvy (Elegy for Google Glass)
My eyeglasses have no further plans than to resolve myopia’s pulled-cotton dispersal of color and line. I see a stranger and record nothing—or rather only that which impresses by whatever trick of sentimentality and projection, to be remixed later with errant judgment, misrecalled odor, song snippet, affiliated neural drek. Memory: less faithful than film, itself a specter absorbed into dot-matrix vapor, like the spider who liquefies what's solid in order to consume. They say within the decade we'll capture every moment, cameras wedded to retina or temple, digital lives cast like second shadows, dispassionate, searchable surplus. We'll interrupt our arguments to spectate our arguments, shout at the selves caught in the act of shouting at each other, tip the mirror, live in infinite reverb. We'll fret over storage, live voluminous in airspace suffocating with all the us there's ever been. Days will be made to extend like clever cabinets, jangled with shelves and accordion doors, so we can slide out of the time happening to us and into the time in which we're happening, our four eyes looking forward, backward, askance, always outside-in. 
Emily Van Kley’s collection, The Cold and the Rust (Persea, 2018) was awarded the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize. Also the recipient of the Iowa Review Award, the Florida Review Editor’s Award, and the Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, Emily has been a Civitella Ranieri Fellow. She currently lives with her partner in Olympia, Washington, where she teaches and performs aerial acrobatics.
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