KAITLYN AIRY
WEST VIRGINIA
In the hills of Droop Mountain
the sky is a sheet of vellum-light
softening the deciduous green. The hollow
and its trees are cloudfed, dripping. White hounds
drift among their woolen flocks. We ascend
to pure winter, the dark pupils of you
taking in snow, the blue
of your irises bright and scant as if
belladonnaed. In the cranberry bog:
whole clutches of crimson goblets,
pitcher plants full of snowmelt.
I take your hand. You are thinking
of the alpine steeple, summit of deertrails
blown white with storm in which
I fear getting lost.
There is a name for these arterial trees but
we do not know it. You
who can name everything in these woods
who over many seasons bring me
to patches of ghostpipes and moss
when I am my most homesick.
Love, it is strange
that I cannot think of an eastern
forest in which I was not with you.
Yours are the footsteps I listen for
when you have gone in search of the night
where I dare not follow.
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*** ** ***
DRIFT THEORY
Starfish revise their routines
grazing in droves towards a whale fall.
Atop the black cold: pipeworms blooming
and closing, combing motes of flesh
from spectral flowerbeds. Of continental
drift theory, the preliminary data
was so scant it was called an essay
in geopoetry. Imagine whole kelp forests
not-yet razed. Imagine thinking the ocean
is always blue. There is always that vertigo
of drift–as if, eyes closed, I might
find myself moving ever home. Killer
whales shouldering huge, grey crests.
Shoals of fish glimmering
in their inscrutable murmuration.
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*** ** ***
RUNOFF
The algae bloomed wetly, furred,
sucked in a slow runnel. Topsoil
followed, the seepage of filth
made by intelligent animals
corralled against their troughs.
They say if you fall inside a silo
you must disperse yourself
evenly, on your belly, else be crushed
by the weight of so many single grains.
Have you ever heard a word so lovely as
nightsoil? They spray the fields at night
while the town sleeps. I cannot remember
the last time I dreamt a smell. When Christ
cast the demons into the swine
they ran off the cliff and into the sea. Legion.
It suggests a kind of agency.
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*** ** ***
PHYSICS
Guess what, I know how time and space work in the normal way.
One day a person blued their whites
for the last time, and the art of lacemaking
was lost to a county of no particular importance.
One day my partner of seven years
fell down the stairs into the long dream and awakened
as a child. A frontal lobe matter,
but also a form of time travel, the future
caving in on itself. 12 minutes can go on forever in this way.
Drink the coffee, ask for coffee. You already
had the coffee. Entropy? That’s
the ferment of melons in July–bees sugar-drunk
and bumbling about, then dying in a hot house corner.
An entire sector of the economy concerning rocks
so that with a single diamond
your love might become more propertied.
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*** ** ***
QUESTIONS FOR THE ABSENT GRANDMOTHER
Does your blood sing & when you press your tongue
to hush its throb does it taste of copper or something sweet?
What part of you allowed the apples to rot in the blue bowl?
Are your insides mangled like the barbed wire fence
of this military complex? Was it you who did the mangling?
In the afterlife are you riddled with bullets & trawling the black river?
Or are you somewhere in girlhood
before the harsh white light shut your skull?
You were a child drawn to the moss
the lush of it languishing upon feldspar–
You were pulling thistlefur from your sister’s hair in kindness–
You were adorning your meals with ferns
foraged from the mountainside?
When, then, did you become a woman ragged
with the white scent of lilacs?
When the landmines made a ruined castle of your mountain?
When you searched for the swallows
& their young upon its southern face?
If I murmur to you in the blue dark
am I then an honorary bird in the spectacle
of murmuration?
Our discourse then a flock? A sedge? A murder?
And in your country wandering the mausoleum
with your lover is against the rules
but is it sacrilege? Are its ghosts starved for touch
or resolute in their parting?
And isn’t pressing your spectral mouth against the wind
a kind of kissing?
What kind of plants grow inside a body abandoned?
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*** ** ***
DAYLIGHT SAVINGS
Turn back the clocks to green
From the tree-blind all light is sepulchral
A charred ghost of wildfire
where the prairie recedes
I walk the lip of the lake
pocketing agates as I go
Find a cardinal feather
A few steps further–the corpse
Along the highway a rash
of billboard evangelism:
If you die tonight do you know
where you will go?
This is not my home
There is a bit of god lodged in me
when I cut the fat from my steak
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KAITLYN AIRY
Kaitlyn Airy is a Korean American poet, essayist and adoptee. Her work is found or forthcoming in Fence, Post Road, The Kenyon Review, Poets.org, and elsewhere. She received an MFA in poetry from the University of Virginia, where she currently teaches as a Research Associate and Lecturer. She also serves as an Associate Editor for Poetry Northwest. In her spare time she enjoys tracking down patches of ghostpipes, experimenting with fermentation, and haunting her own house.
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A Dozen Nothing 