The woman sat on the train wrapped tightly in her coat. She stared at herself in the window and eyed the other passengers.

My therapist’s name was Sean. I remember that most of all because it was easy for me to say. The sound sh never caused trouble. I could curse or tell people to shut up all day long. But es caused a world of trouble. 

The fact of his wariness stops her; Viv gathers the remaining clumps of her hamburger, squeezes them between her fingers but no juice comes out. She stares at the clumps. 

No good relationship, if you could call it that, ever started in a bar.

When clearly it could be a mommy or even a child for that matter.

I remember Ian saying I was not a novelist and I think, as much as it pained me at the time to hear this, he was correct.

A woman waited in line in front of me, anxiously watching the television behind the plexiglass partition. The gas station attendant broke rolls of quarters in half and dropped them into the register. A second woman spoke on screen, dressed in an orange pant suit, matching neon lipstick and a gold crescent moon pinned to her lapel below her microphone. I imagined the petroleum-wax scent her breath might leave as she spoke.          

My god, I remember how badly I wanted her to see.

I’m fascinated by the idea of nonlinear time — that linear time is a construct we use to make sense of the world. Now, maybe without linear time we’d all be mad. But I find great comfort in accepting the idea, intellectually, that linear time isn’t necessarily real. 

I will watch you kill the cat.

How To Be an Acclaimed Poet in America

She picks a bony honeysuckle blossom off the bush and sticks the stem under the elastic of her bathing suit bottom.

Can imagine it: black vans with windows tinted green like bug eyes, all those bodies stolen away like women in wartime. 

The night after my book launch at Power House Arena in Brooklyn, I slept over at my friend Logan’s house in Clinton Hill. In the morning as she dressed for work and I bemoaned stupid shit I’d said

I never saw them but I knew people shot our outhouses.

The cock in Hitchcock

He stands so close I can make out the threads on his polo shirt.

Suicide is all theory until you fall in love with a piece of shit.

BESTIARY was released in October of 2016 by Graywolf Press and has garnered a great deal of praise, including being longlisted for the 2016 National Book Award in Poetry. Kelly was kind enough to answer a few of my questions via email regarding the notion of self in poetry, how trauma and grief can manifest in art, and how her critical work informs (or fails to inform) her poetry.

She can't remember the important bad things. I ask her about the divorces and the dead dogs buried in the woods and the cracks in the bathroom tile and the negative, blood red balance in her checking account and her eyes go blank and she shakes her head like she's been overcome by some faint neurological chill. 

I have watched too much reality TV about Kimye and teen mothers. This is why I cannot explain April like a normal person.