Gia Kelliher

5 poems

Gia Kelliher is a poet and filmmaker from Louisiana living in Philly. Her poetry has appeared in Expat Press, Apocalypse Confidential and another few places. She needs a ride to home depot to buy some wood.

Vinny doing a job

Vinny is a tile layer, jeweler, shopkeep, antique dealer, barterer, trader, a hardo, south philly wop, a man who talks, loves all cats, has his ex wife on the phone, a fixer. He is taking his son to the shore, he is taking his friend who is a girl and is also young to Giorgios – a very good restaurant that will close next month because it is not a very good restaurant. He is not taking his son to the shore. There are reasons for these inconveniences. Here are some reasons: morons, cheapos, dirty people, tellers, whiners. Vinny takes a day job, a few weeks in someone else’s apartment, kicking the plaster and smattering paint, fixing the bad work and turning it into good work. He needs two more days, the wirings on the fritz, the drywall is bloating, he needs another two days, taking slices of american cheese, browsing the girls’ closets and touching stacks of cotton shirts. Most work is bad work – Vinny’s offering you a favor, he asks for nothing in return, he needs to call his ex wife. Vinny wants to sample your confit, to bring you rainbow cookies from Isgros, Vinny’s got an eye for quality and hands like kaiser rolls. Vinny is a diabetic, the Italian affliction. A germ that feeds on growth – of the spirit, of agreed upon facts, of empty space. He’s becoming older and fatter and balder – they took his toes first and put him back in the boot. But all matters of the body and its clotted systems, can be soothed since he’s got ahold of the good serum – the obstinance and the pride. Vinny’s text tone sounds like a cash register, he’s sending money to his friend who is a girl. He isn’t eating unless he’s drinking chocolate milk from the plastic quart. He’s on the phone with his ex wife, the dome light is hanging, butter–color fiberglass and a nest of copper wire spilling from the broad side. Ability erects putty walls around the heart. He’s safe from heart disease, the Italian affliction. This vacancy is infested with hangers, the tenants have gone, they were dirty girls – whiners, stupids. The girl bitch turns into the wife bitch. Vinny’s got a kid who’s 10, and that's all he is. Spit on a job, 3k a week, a lot of money, but he doesn’t need it. He’s boxing with greed, the Italian affliction – for the swellings of desire, he’s got a reliable enswell. They’re taking his foot, he’s got to lose some weight or else they’ll take his calf and reunite it with the heifer. He’s forgotten what his penis looks like from above. He’s gentle, he can stroke the cat without it running. He’s not good at his job, but somebody is worse. He doesn’t need this job, a job is a place to talk, a place to watch the sunlight change shape, become unseen polygons when it comes through another person's home. Vinny’s got to scrape the grout off the tile before it dries, he needs two more days. Other people’s cabinets and other peoples’ tins of oil, premade sauces, oats, pastas, peanut butter, a browser of another’s sweet private life. Other people's medicines, their deformities, their special afflictions. Vinny’s nauseous today, he’s grateful they’re taking his foot away, he’ll need two more days. He doesn’t notice a threat when it arrives in the mail, it’s lilliputian, it’s a noncompete, it’s a little worm and he’s a big cow.

The patternseeking brain

Fitting the mother in bridal lace.
Country –
routine wash:
the bosoms, the
navel, the outdoor hose.
Carcass of a truck bandaged in moss – a place
in a wood –
a reflex.
Dog
could
fold her cruddy lips at the phantom
tit.
Horse whistle,
Crow,
Rice runner,
The apse.
Mating
And eating and death.

Expo

Villainous
Puerile
Tack and tack off
The slobber in the muzzle

Facsimile
Pylon
Cupping the fluid
Steeples vibrate amidst rapture

Vigilance
Forearm
Ripper by tributary
Burbling with noxious foam

Peripatetic
Flea
Western Kentucky
Gone to do some healing

Pantomime
Notice
The plaster cartilage-pliable
The Elba of mind and place

The living space

He, adamite, all lateral with those
two gray-green eyes. Their implicit yield, their
instinct, their gaze drawn, an adult burden
of logos, temperance in the antelapse.
Gentle, ruricolic touch which is all
palm and squeeze, simian ways with the doting,
grooming, delousing, ferric in scent and taste.
Noon: windowlight against the far wall is
ruddled and bloody. The little table –
it’s books, it’s flowers, it’s avalanche of
receipts and envelopes. And the floor –
it’s shoes, it’s binkies, it’s clods of dust and
hair. Yellow paint, lamp, crucial pills, lionine
carpet, four modest chairs, gullwing clothing
rack, kitchen, pots, pillows, hinges, knobs, warmth,
warmth, warmth, spaces thick with carbon raffle,
eating oxygen in great heaves. If this
is the Garden, what then of the bills, hm?
Desire sculpting the body, casting
off the excess. Ambition addling the
wants and the needs. Finding scant time to
look around, to fill my mouth with gifted
wine, to fuck my loving husband. Milk fat
forming crust on the tender part of my
body. Hatchling, my child, beautiful
bag of spittle, my curly-haired daughter,
tumid glob of cells, formed from fluid to flesh.
Will she persist in the weeping, Dan? Will
she eat up all our food? And will this
durgan thing leave blight on my skin, bloat, rash,
and purpling scars? Daughter, are you a wedge?
Can I be trusted to hold you cooly
in my mouth, hirsute in brave new places.
Writhing and leaking, kid, you lay all prone
in my arms, little heliozoa.
And I think, what stolid doctrine commands
the dermal walls, what keeps them from seep
and coalescence, are these expanses
of clammy flush, wetted, hoed, and laid fallow
for little buds like stoma from which will
spring limbs and bridges between your flesh and
my flesh like some two headed Durga? My
Daughter, your growth is frightening to me. And
I love you, it collects interest, my love,
it is a nonnegotiable. Your hair,
your eyes, your monstrous appetites oranging
the pink ring which is your mouth. Keep them,
the strands of my body and multiply
them at will.

Currebenediction — Coal horse

Tips of the fingers emptied of blood, a greasy balm
of sweat and dust on the skin, July gone rigid
as it descends into night. Hands, cord-bound, led blind,
cloth gauzy from use
And use And use.

The sentence of the impudent:
The Dragging Death. Bataille, the instrument,
the steady horse suspended by canvas straps,
at the chest and the pelvis,
the guts of the animal, black
and rigid from particulate,
the air so wet with coal.
And so the hooves hang gentle,
drifting cloven garlands.

And we ran until he couldn’t.

My steps are waltzy, shoeless,
lithe,
all joints
and skin.
At the outset he did run, my garroter,
with dumb animal pathos.
The land spilling out ahead of us,
its texture braille. On occasion, the wet rock defiled
by some blasphemous vegetable.
On a fine belt of air the Anemoi led me swift
Must be pity
Must be exaltation

Into the pit, the horse and the condemned –
of each’s respective sentence, obliging. Obliging
of duty, of pain,
of humility, of shame and of denial,
of brawn, brooding, and prayer,
of submission,
of descent.

Into the drop with no end.

Like between two hands,
a shining coin
of light, then
at last
crushed between the palms.