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February 2020 Poetry Feature: Victoria Kelly

February 28, 2020 Poetry

Victoria Kelly graduated from Harvard University, Trinity College Dublin, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of the poetry collection When the Men Go Off to War (Naval Institute Press), about her experience as a military spouse. Her poetry has appeared in Best American Poetry and has been made into an animated short film by Motion Poems. She is the author of the novel Mrs. Houdini (Atria Books / Simon & Schuster). She lives in northern Virginia, where she works in public relations, writes and is raising her two young daughters.

Table of Contents

After the War
In the Next World
Cathedral
Before My First Husband’s War
Conversation on My Boyfriend

Graffito Beholds a Sculpted Dionysus Head

November 1, 2017 Issue 14, Issue 14 Poetry, Poetry

By STEVE BARBARO

Archeological Museum, Napoli

Beard-barnacled, chokingly-fixed, almost somehow stupid, yes,
almost like will itself pushed to the extreme of its own
absence, almost like presence perpetuated so as to obliterate

personhood’s merest increments—ah, but don’t
listen to even the soundest advice you are given, never, never, no,
Graffito is sure he hears the inert face telling him, yeah,

forget pondering your person in light of pure practicalities,
and fuck letting any of the standard measures of modern
existence—money or fame, say, or so-called community, or (gasp

gasp) success—clutter the local, the cosmic
clatter of the single soul clanging the skin and organs