Three Poems
By Kelly Schirmann - Jun 20, 2017

Dream of Relevancy
Everyone knows
what their life should be
and also that it isn’t
I watched a video of a woman
saying money was a river
and another video of a man
saying money was the devil
He was weeping and spitting
Which is more true?
You have a new notification
from your most familiar sky
It’s over the town you grew up in
It wants you to come back
No one wants to be reminded
of what the world really is
There’s a canyon
or there’s an abyss
You’re walking on the rim of it
or you’re down at the bottom
taking photographs of the sky
At my family reunion an aunt
took my palm and told me
I had no emotion
I would have five children
including miscarriages
I am an artist
and so embarrassed
to be down at the ocean
like this / weeping
and spitting
Feeling anything
about it at all
Poems
For years I hated reading poems
and mostly I still do
They hurt my feelings
with how little they care
to fuck with me
You can not accept
all the poems in poetry
Lots of berries
are poison / or worthless
I don’t think poetry
is even poetry anymore
It is cutting the ribbon
of its identity / over and over
Or addressing a venture capitalist
Or talking to the world
When I talk to the world
I sound like an asshole
When I wake up
I try to go outside immediately
I have a blueberry bush in my yard
I feel angry every day
I used to care
that the world liked poetry
but the world is already a poem
that I don’t want to read
It’s about the blooms and starts
of perceived abundance
It doesn’t want to talk to you
But I do
Dream of Geography
We were walking through the woods
on a wide path
I was brushing for ticks
That’s what you do out here
It was a scrubgrass place
but lush and green
Like all of America
It absorbed my projections
that it had been waiting for me
this whole time
I had no need of death
and the spring creek burned my feet
It helped to think of everyone
as an animal
I hoped that none of my desires
would intervene
I thought
I should really thank someone
but so many of my thoughts
are pulled from my mind
almost instantly
like by a wind
***
KELLY SCHIRMANN is the author of Popular Music (Black Ocean, 2016). She lives in the Pacific Northwest, and at kellyschirmann.com
Art by Mallory Whitten.