I have read the report—inconclusive.
Yet, I know how much your brain weighs,
your liver, your heart. Your ordinary,
damaged heart. I know it by the gram.
The end of romance was what the teenage girl
was telling you about on a bench in the Jardin
in San Miguel de Allende, giving you T.M.I.,
but you realized she might need a Father who is not in heaven.
She gasps: Tinder is even sleazier in Mexico, how could it be
nostalgic? You listened, like your poems do when you write
them down in the cafes of Kerouac’s time here. You are Angelico
Americano with Instagram—troubled children of your own back home.
Five New Poems by VICTORIA KELLY
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
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
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