(Emily Kendal Frey)
Emily Kendal Frey lives in Portland, Oregon and teaches at Portland Community College. She is the author of AIRPORT (Blue Hour Press, 2009) and, with Zachary Schomburg, TEAM SAD (Cinematheque, forthcoming).
Five Poems
BIRTH
Going on three days now my scalp itches like a tree in heat.
What's coming up out of me?
A rabbit exploding from a rainbow, maybe.
SMART
Am I smart enough to be androgynous?
Constantly shitting myself in your name.
Nothing is as beautiful as what is not beautiful.
Except sheet rock.
LOOK
My third eye is swollen.
I cry out of it.
O I cry I'm so lonely.
I'm so lonely for a sky and a piece of ice.
GO
My mother walks into the ravine.
You can't take a picture of a dead ocean.
CARTOGRAPHY
The anti-aphorism.
The dead ocean.
The anti-aphorism is the dead ocean.
The depression.
The anti-depression.
A depression is a place, an indent.
A place I can get to.
Your gold chest and my gold chest.
The last time I saw you at the entrance to the DeKalb subway
station.
Love reminds me of love.
You remind me of a subway station.
A dead ocean.
I could be Artemis, or at least her arrows.
The anti-myth.
The anti-matter.
Dreams left along the highway.
Technology left along the highway.
The dream you breathed.
The myth you breathed.
You could be the sun god, breaking above a roof.
You could be a thing or two.
A depression.
An indent.
A place I can get to.
I'm all lined up on the interstate.
Aphorisms flutter behind me.
Dead ocean in the distance.
The anti-dead ocean.
The anti-dead.
The work of being un-dead.
The work of building a highway.
The work of an aphorism.
The work of a myth.
The work of technology.
The work of an indent.
The word "nest."
The word "home."
The word "highway."
A place I can get to.
Tombstones lined up like knives.
Body my body full of knives.
The kitchen is a dead ocean.
The ocean is a knife.
A depression.
A place holding an anti-myth.
A myth holding an ocean.
You flew up and out of me like a dead tombstone.
You moved like a word.
A word not an aphorism.
One word and no meaning.
The word for ocean.
An indent on the highway.
A highway made of birds.
A subway station filled with birds.