Kristy Odelius is a poet and Assistant Professor of English at North Park University where she teaches poetry and 19th century British literature. She is a co-founder of Near South, a Chicago-based journal of innovative writing. Her poems, essays and reviews have appeared or in Notre Dame Review, Chicago Review, Combo, ACM, La Petite Zine, keepgoing, The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century, and others. Her chapbook Bee Spit is out this month from dancing girl press, and her book, Strange Trades, will be out next Fall from Shearsman.
Thoughts of Falling, Pollen, Pare
When champion-bred
leaves lie splayed
like minimum wage
a raincoat czar,
spreads its liquid
hands thin, I’ll say
not on: your life, your daddy’s knee, a new knife blade.
Try, swim the brackish margin
between holy and hole, the ocean’s
backstitched locomotion loosely
recites “no, there’s no such
night in prosaic blood” nodding
its great nose toward the
mollusky dance-floor.
When honey leaks from
eyes bent to breezes
eyes like peach pits
fragrant and useless,
the czar disappears into
the rain’s rumpled plumage
my heart’s gong-bruised knees
buckling through branches.
It’s bee-spit
that blows me
I admit
and you
away.