The Ways We Kill Each Other | To the Glory of Untamed Places

The Ways We Kill Each other

With a look or a laugh we might have held back
on a better day, a less selfish moment when we considered
what it feels like to be the outsider,
utterly othered and unbelonging, or stepped outside
ourselves or outside of time, even for a moment—

the sleepless nights backs turned facing opposite walls
counting different herds of sheep, wild dogs barking on the hillside,
the pewter color of our togetherness, sage-smudged ghosts
christening each new home we made, each time
we swore to get better and we sometimes did;

when I turned the doorknob and really left this time,
when you didn’t eat the fish that was too damn dry,
when we left the dishes piling up out of spite,
the time the knife slipped, and we ran
to the hospital shaken,     clinging to each other,      afraid…

had we really just been cutting vegetables?

Somewhere in the mix of growing up, a wild hymn
sings itself into us and we become this and then this
but along the way that other us dies, is dying,
slipping away past every minor insult, the hurts
we will never want to tally.

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To the Glory of Untamed Places

Strip away the wild things born
to live in this one place,
level the unevenness and straighten

every natural curve that gets
away from itself and into
a beauty beyond beauty—

transplant the children
of ancient forests, sapling
and shrub, rose, thorn and thistle—

transport rock across a thousand
miles—orphans taken
from their riverbeds

and tiny shards shrapnel-torn
from the blasted hole where once
a mountain pressed its limestone into sky—

place it into ordered lines, press it
all into uniform shapes, straight edges,
linear curves, sharp corners, hedges,

and box it all in, charge admission,
name it after yourself…pretend it
is something you can own,

look at this sanitized installation
like it is art and, in a coup de grâce
of blasphemy, call it good.

Kelly Vance is a graduate student in Eastern Kentucky University’s MFA program in creative writing where she received the Emerging Writers Award for poetry in 2021. In selecting Vance for this award, Jen Currin wrote, “Vance’s voice is at turns humorous, tender, elegiac.” In addition to writing poetry, Kelly has a passion for encouraging young poets and is the Chair of Kentucky State Poetry Society’s Annual Student Poetry Contest (2019-2023). In 2019, she completed the Conscious Feminine Leadership Academy affiliated with Women Writing for (a) Change, Cincinnati, and incorporates many conscious leadership concepts into her writing, mentorship, and professional work as a psychiatrist.