Candice M. Kelsey
Candice M. Kelsey [she/her] is a poet, essayist, and educator living in both Los Angeles and Georgia. A finalist for a Best Microfiction 2023, she is the author of seven books; her latest chapbook POSTCARDS from the MASTHEAD has just been released with boats against the current. She mentors an incarcerated writer through PEN America and reads for The Los Angeles Review. Please find her at https://www.candicemkelseypoet.com/.
Experts Say Reciting the Alphabet Backwards Helps Manage Stress
Zucchini rots from small bruises on the blossom, much as
your hands budded plum from piling firewood into the Durango.
Ximeno Avenue and a Los Angeles sky, we wanted a fire
where once we wanted nothing but each other; no one
Van Morrisoned like us in bed, like two seeds planted. I can’t
usher squash, corn, or pole beans from Georgia red clay
today—intentions fail. And Augusta’s fall line creates two
soil zones. You collected so much kindling then, felt no
reason to leave dried twigs and branches in the underbrush;
quiet as a vine borer you delivered boughs to our front
porch. Logs you rolled from felled trees, limbed and bucked,
obstructed the hallway of our mid-modern century. Life
never promised the right size hearth. You stoked the embers
morning and night, obsessing over the flue and poker—
losing the point of warmth. Here we find our fall line. Feral
kittens birthed in our bed, and now you sleep on the closet floor
just to be near the litter, silent as ash. You like to collect.
I cannot be an accumulation, will not play your compilation
hoarding into the mystic. We are Piedmont and Coastal
geography run through by a Mesozoic shoreline of oblique-slip
faults. Before leaving you, I planted winter vegetable seeds,
explained that squash, corn, and beans are called the three sisters:
determined to nurture each other in the soil like family. Are
cold sticks and seeds the final blossom, the end of a marriage
broken like twenty years of rot? We prune, find tiny bruises.
An abecedarian, even in reverse, cannot make it better.
