Poetry by Cole Kelly

      Shawn Kent CC





What shakes and shakes and shakes

Up a long driveway I found a door with locks and a patio that only one person ever sits on.

She rolls a cigarette and tells me that she quit for six months and really I know that means four with some on the weekends, and I don’t judge her because I know how it feels to have white knuckles on the wheel trying to steer in a different direction.

She tells me how more is always being built here, how the driveway needs to be repaved,
and how the stones on the doorway aren’t heavy enough
to weigh down what is trying to float away.

I have this theory about how our hands will shake with our potential, like water bursting through a dam. How those of us who avoid the howling of our hearts must find a way to quell the thundering sound.

I think that our lips will quiver with the urge towards our destiny, 
and we will have to calm our nerves and 
quench our thirst 
find something louder than what we refuse to be.

I think it takes a whole life of building and repairing to keep the water at bay.

What we do not let create us will instead haunt us, 
and we will spend our lives trying to soothe 
what shakes and shakes and shakes.






​The Burden 

A man sits down at the Jackman and McRoss in Battery Point while I’m having a coffee. I heard him coming down the street because he was screaming “fuck you you fucking shit cunt,” to every person that he could see.

From across the tiny round table saliva drips from the edge of his mouth and he lifts his head once in a while to yell some threat at anything that moves, anything that flutters or shadows in his periphery; an old woman, a reversing car, a dog. 

It doesn’t seem like a pleasure for him, it seems like a burden, some holy vocation, passed down from grandfather to father to son, and I don’t understand why he does it, but I understand how some things just must be done.  

He squints to see me better, and this man with a mouth full of red gums and a face of scarred lines, tells me that it’s alright that I’m not beautiful, and it’s enough that I am kind. 

He starts to weep and he says he hasn’t done that in 12 years, he says when he was six his father put his mother in the bin, and when he says it still hurts I do believe him. 

I really do believe him.

I believe that what isn’t tended to turns into that kind of pain, the kind that eats you from the inside until your teeth fall out and you scream at strangers in rage, until you sob and snivel and drool into your chest, until a table outside with a woman you don’t know is the only place you can, for a moment, feel like you can rest. 

I believe that such things unhealed could bring you to this, until you suddenly become livid and dip your fingers in her fancy coffee, fall off the table and smash your bottle of stolen whiskey. Until the police that everyone called drag you to a paddy wagon while you wail to an unforgiving audience, who were, just moments ago, your phantoms and your undeserving victims.  

Yes, I do believe it can become that way,

When no one has put their hands on your chest and held them there until your heart beat slowed and your breathing became even and until you are still, being cared for, being held, 
without question, 
without condition, 
without words.

Of course I believe you. 
Of course, I believe you when you say that it still hurts.

​




All the hardness done 

When she married a man 
who got so drunk he would push her, 
her father read a poem about how lovers
would meet at the kitchen counter
with the grey cool shadows over the sink 
of an overcast evening 
the kind of light 
that is just dim enough 
to let something else be seen. 

And in the glow of something setting  
these lovers, this married couple,
would let the sadness they have known 
rest back from anger 
to its true and tired nature. 
The way an infant’s screaming 
must also, in time, break 
and rest back 
to tired and quiet breathing.

And in this story they would kiss 
the way maybe him and his first wife did 
the way maybe we all have 
not just for tenderness 
but for surrender. 
To rest back into each other's familiar arms and 
hope the softness of that 
might make up for all the hardness done.

​


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Cole Kelly is a seeker, healer and story teller of merging lines from the furthest rocky coasts of Turtle Island. She carries the blood of sailors and old sea dogs, deep sea divers and land locked healers, mothers of many children with hands of dirt and breasts full of milk, alcoholics with bellies full of booze and hearts full of desperation; one hand in life and one in death. She is the daughter of love and tragedy, of ferocious women and big lumbering men, the descendant of curses, of 100 mile walkers and medicine women and Mi'kmaq bear killers. 

She moves through the world with a traveler's heart and writes through the lense of her experiences in the gritty, the dangerous, the beautiful and the strange. She is a seeker of Road Magic, a poet, a musician and a bodyworker. She lives across the world from her native home, in Cygnet, on lutruwita.