"Untitled" by Jing Lin

Two poems by Kelly Grace Thomas

My Father Tells Me Pelicans Blind Themselves

searching for food.
                  Diving head first. Eyes
                                 open: suicide.

They starve into myth.
                  And hatch hungry
                                 children. They peck

at parents who strike
                  back. The young revived
                                 by drip of father’s blood.

Or booze. Today there are leaks
                  I cannot keep.
                                I have spilled too much.

Appetite: my deepest
                  grave. This family
                                 flies to silent

corners. Until we bleed
                  and bird again.
                                 I’ve drunk

all the body
                  this wine will allow.
                                 Boatburned, I kneel.

Father: Hold me
                  like a child.
                                Sing me to sea.

Dear Kerosene

I too have been bottled /and burned/At 13, I filled duffle bags with empty/Marlboros/packs and diet pills hid them / behind floral dresses in my closet/ When my mother found them/she did not tell me to stop/I was raised arson /Kerosene, their eyes undressed you /from oil/Your body a body made for other bodies/Lowercased in the hands of many men /I know you remember /their names At 16, I let a boy named Noah /light my wick. He finished fast/Never looked /at me again. Disaster is coming /I hear you are the safest /bride/ Made for Hurricane Lamp or jet fuel/ Men have stolen fire / Time to bring her home Every night I torch /the house I live in /I burn each boat I will not retreat.

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Kelly Grace Thomas is the winner of the 2017 Neil Postman Award for Metaphor from Rattle, a 2018 finalist for the Rita Dove Poetry Award, a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a Best of the Next nominee. BOAT/BURNED, her first full-length collection, is forthcoming from YesYes Books in 2019. Kelly’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in: DIAGRAM, Tinderbox, Nashville Review, Sixth Finch, Muzzle, PANK and more. Kelly currently works to bring poetry to underserved youth as the Manager of Education and Pedagogy for Get Lit-Words Ignite. She is also the co-author of Words Ignite: Explore, Write and Perform, Classic and Spoken Word Poetry (Literary Riot). She is currently a reader for Tinderbox Poetry Journal. She lives in the Bay Area with her husband. www.kellygracethomas.com

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 In her mysterious monochromatic photographs, Jing Lin reconstructs a familiar world that no one has been to. Her background in motion pictures informs her current work. As a graduate photography student at Academy of Art University, she worked with multiple darkroom techniques in traditional and alternative printing processes. She blurs the edge between photography and painting through the use of experimental processes. Solitary, Jing’s most recent body of work, portrays a nonexistent place to examine the theme of self-confinement. Constantly, she explores photography with these questions in mind: What did I see? What did I not see?  www.jinglinphotography.com/

Chinese, b. 1993, Chengdu, China, based in San Francisco, USA.