GERTRUDE PRESS STANDS IN SOLIDARITY WITH BLACK LIVES MATTER, AND COMMITS TO CONTINUE TO FEATURE THE STORIES, ART AND VOICES OF THE BLACK QUEER AND TRANS PEOPLE WHO HAVE ALWAYS BEEN ON THE FRONT LINES OF REVOLUTION.
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by Emily Van Kley

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.

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Picture
​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.

© COPYRIGHT 2022. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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  • DONATE