K. T. BILLEY
The Rusty Toque | Issue 13 | Poetry | November 30, 2017
MISSIVE FROM A FORMER MASTODON
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Prepare yourself
and eye shadow. In the future and their legs across the yard. More than aggression and glands, The second you see to decompose: witnessing A species A spiral |
for what you’ll miss
people look like ours, in the goose pen, this is a watershed. yourself anything a sibling a softening. of limestone clock laughing at its own |
most: amaranth
love each other hollering hair A Flood. as bigger than else, you begin or layer of gravel. bad aim. |
GLOSSARY
I. Clutches
Enable transmission
from one component
to another, whenever
power or motion must
be controlled in amount,
or over time.
II. Struts
The reduction
of unsprung
weight improves
handling, and ride.
III. & Brakes
It is normal
for them to be
mounted rigidly
with respect
to the body
of the vehicle.
CLUTCHESa spool of barb wire my calf the longest scar clots are provisions a set of lips my blood let a time signature |
STRUTSdefining a fence on the way down on the body of a woman attractive means stretch marks, more-than collagen glue I pack alone an autograph in irons, saying this is how I hit the spot |
& BRAKES (II)caught and now you don't consider over-expressed birthing collage as consent for the long haul of hankering on the dotted line of highway the road the hay the jackpot |
CLUTCHES STRUTS & BRAKES (III)
I finally coughed up the triptych
in the back of my throat.
The wrench, the storm,
the centaur waist.
The suspense with which
I hold my own.
K. T. BILLEY grew up in Red Deer, Alberta, moved to New York City to study poetry, then came gratefully back to Canada. Her debut collection Vulgar Mechanics will be published by Coach House Books in 2019. Her Icelandic-English translation of
Stormwarning by Kristín Svava Tómasdóttir won the 2017 Leif Inger Sjöberg Prize—a bilingual edition is forthcoming from Phoneme Media. Her Spanish-English translation of Chintungo by Chilean poet Soledad Marambio is now available from Ugly Ducking Presse. A Vallum Poetry Prize winner and former Teaching Fellow in Poetry at Columbia University, she is not a Fellow At All.
Stormwarning by Kristín Svava Tómasdóttir won the 2017 Leif Inger Sjöberg Prize—a bilingual edition is forthcoming from Phoneme Media. Her Spanish-English translation of Chintungo by Chilean poet Soledad Marambio is now available from Ugly Ducking Presse. A Vallum Poetry Prize winner and former Teaching Fellow in Poetry at Columbia University, she is not a Fellow At All.
