Poetry by Eve Kenneally

​A Grasp

Everything I do, I do for a body. I don’t know whose. I crave markings
for the same reason I can’t find my way out of new buildings: I need

identifiers. The familiar half-slants when I dream; my house is no longer
my house, though ultimately I wake and own nothing. I’m not

particular. I just want marble countertops to cry on. If a person has breached
their gaze for me, it lasts the length of a greeting – then leans fast

into ritual, to steer me through; even as it weakens my lungs, even as I leave
earlier to miss the same train. This whole city a humming swollen lip

of June, as ritual, to keep us circling. To keep us thinking, I am so alive
                it stills me. Every mannered, droning part.




In the Hospital, Time is a Stillness

Slow warning. Stranger strapped to gurney
for hours. I know this chair. My grandmother says,

I’ll regret covering up these shadows. She says,
You have to know how they build their cities before

you visit. We say, Eat. We say, We’re sorry. Those
couldn’t possibly be birds. I skip out on visits & lose

most of my time: a slow trance in reverse, each moment
its own steel crawl. You do these things til you dull, then

you do them again – a dreamless gathering. I see this thing
I throw my body into & am all animal, wired wrong. Instincts:


half-survival, long numb. I lived in my head for years. He was
calm & spoke to me, an old dialogue. It made me sick.

​


Another Elegy

I remember that nobody drowned:
collect things not to read them. Part

of learning how to think is in trances,
is knowing we have no right to be here.

Half-spells brought with measure. This
can’t be survival – blood, nearly human.

It was your face I wanted; something of
significance. A wet towel rolled and sapped

of color. The smallest men look backwards.
The rest we deserve. Even if it’s pretty – even

if it’s around the neck.

​


Some Might Call This Progress

If this is a poem about loss, let’s end it here.
You dance, I lay unseen, litter wrapped my
ankles. There’s something I need, in a post-
romantic way: thieving is not insisting. Look
in a mirror. You’re going to thank me for it. Deer
fever aches sharp & ready, the borders exposing all
those faces at their picnics wanting everything
but window screens. Don’t call me a wildflower. Don’t
tell me I’m thriving. These things are made impossible
by others.

​

Bio: Eve Kenneally is a New York-based freelance writer and recent alumna of the MFA program at the University of Montana. Her chapbook "Something Else Entirely" was released in January 2017 by Dancing Girl Press. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Salt Hill, Whiskey Island, Yemassee, Bop Dead City, decomP, Stirring, and elsewhere.

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