Bestiary Quotes

“Refuse the old means of measurement.
Rely instead on the thrumming wilderness of self. Listen.
-From "Out West”
― Donika Kelly, Bestiary: Poems

“I have never known a field as wild
as your heart.
-From "Love Poem: Centaur”
― Donika Kelly, Bestiary: Poems

“You bear a sword and shield, remind me
of her labor, her stoning gaze. What beast

will your blade free next? What call will you loose
from another woman's throat?”
― Donika Kelly, Bestiary: Poems

“You grow. You are large.
You are a 19th century poem.
All of America is inside you,
a catalogue of lives and land
and burrowing things.
-From "Catalogue”
― Donika Kelly, Bestiary: Poems

“What the tongue wants.
Supplication and the burn
of crystals expanding.

To be, always, a waxing,
a waning, and, in waxing
again, not ever the same.

Waste and deferral.
Accumulation and deferral.
You are flesh,

and you are water,
though of the flesh,
you are only muscle,

and of the water,
you are saltless and clean.
Be a caution, a reckoning,

be a thing that breaks
before it bends.”
― Donika Kelly, Bestiary: Poems

“You'd rather be a simpler animal.”
― Donika Kelly, Bestiary: Poems

“Tumbling from what holds me to the world. / O, to do away with the meat and light of me.”
― Donika Kelly, Bestiary: Poems

“The man feels his chest. Am I a ghost?
His lungs reply: You are the bravest stone.”
― Donika Kelly, Bestiary: Poems

“When did one season begin and another end? What branched like a nerve?”
― Donika Kelly, Bestiary: Poems

“Love, how do I gain / what was lost in winter?”
― Donika Kelly, Bestiary: Poems