United States, (b. early 1980s)
Portrait of My Father as a Winged Boar
- When his mother dies—halved
- in a wreck—from her opened
- body springs my father,
- whose name I refuse
- to say as he refuses
- his father, the half-known man
- who sired him. In the dry L.A. light,
- the boy, my father, turns
- so that he is caught—
- one way: a winged boar—
- another: a giant,
- a gold blade of a man—
- both high skulled, thick maned:
- a juvenile without a sounder,
- a boy without a mother.
- He recognizes himself
- only in the man, carves
- himself into golden armor—
- but the rutting
- fact of him, the curved
- tooth, the thick neck
- and beating wings, trembles
- beneath his skin. Whatever sheen
- the California sun
- burnishes out of his body,
- whatever good work
- his thickening hand
- compels, whatever woman
- he touches in the afternoon,
- on the roof, he cannot deny
- his first born, his red fledgling,
- her many heads and hands.
- What he makes for her:
- a junk bike she loves cattle, red
- in the field a mirror
- a red wreckage of her body.
About the Poet:
Donika Kelly, United States, (b. early 1980s) is a poet and educator. A Cave Canem graduate fellow, she has also received a Lannan Residency Fellowship, and a summer workshop fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center. She earned an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin and a PhD in English from Vanderbilt University.
Kelly is the author of the poetry collections The Renunciations (2021) and Bestiary (2016). Bestiary is the winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry, and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Iowa City and is an assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Iowa. [DES-03/22]
Additional information:
- Donika Kelly – https://www.donikakelly.com/
- Kelly at University of Iowa – https://english.uiowa.edu/people/donika-kelly