TWO POEMS by Kelley Beeson

by Kelley Beeson / Thursday, 11 April 2024 / Published in ISSUE 29

Moving Myself Around

I am a crumpled piece of notepaper
moving myself around the house like a scared tenant.
I consider cave-life,
but caves are so wholly black and full of nightimes.

Roads were animal prints I followed.
My heart a slick, scrubbed, washed wood-thing
with unsayable complaints–
a marathon I ran first thing before I was awake.

The day after we sleep together,
the keys lonesome on desks,
I am a bald soul silent
under a tarp waiting for spring.

Near the End

The shape of my hand against the sky as I drive.
The night where we left it.

We are ancient and nearly done with each other.
Wooden instruments whine in their houses for us.

The grit of our lives simmers just over there–
a jammed film reel: a smear of juice from the fruit,
my crossed heart inside my animal lungs.
The scene inseparable
from the rest of the world.

Under indecisive skies
the green in the early
year will come, out of the sheen.

I sit at the cliff.
I almost love him.

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About Kelley Beeson

Kelley Beeson holds a Master of Fine Art in Poetry from the University of Notre Dame and a Master of Library and Information Science from The University of Pittsburgh. She is the recipient of the 2023 Lefty Blondie Press Chapbook Award for her book, Undress. Her work is forthcoming in Kestrel, and The Gulf Tower Forecasts Rain: A Pittsburgh Poetry Anthology and appears in Rogue Agent, Kaliope, Pittsburgh City Paper, and is a Pushcart Prize nominee. Kelley is a disabled writer who grew up in Pittsburgh and left only once for graduate school and deeply missed the hills and valleys of Western PA. She lives in the city, works as a crackerjack librarian and writes as a mad-proud member of the Madwomen in the Attic Writing Workshops since 1992.