About the Writer      

            Claire Kelly's first full-length collection, Maunder, will be available from Palimpsest Press in Spring 2017. She has curated a chapbook of emerging Edmonton poets for Frog Hollow Press’s City Series, which is available for purchase at www.froghollowpress.com. She lives and writes in Edmonton.

Poem for a Woman I Made Up 

She drapes herself over a laundry rack, 

she’s fallen off the bone. 

A crack in the foundation at which her fine chin points.  

What about plaster?  

What about sandpaper? 

Can’t remember the last time her hand  

gripped a paintbrush or how many coats it took 

to layer a shell thick enough to chuck 

plates against. 

Bottom of the stairs, glancing up, 

time wafts right at her — 

all chipped nail polish, a chronic, a habit. 

Oh, to live in a tent, somewhere temperate. 

Her favourite sound is of zippers: 

zzzzzzZZZp!  

Don’t look at her that way, 

sometimes a zipper’s just a zipper. 

Oh, to be in love once 

with that complex boy 

who wouldn’t sit with his back to crowds, 

who failed geography three times. 

Her mouth of memorized mountain ranges, 

of South American capitals, 

of deltas and tectonics. 

Once she was happy 

enough climbing to 

her heights, her depths, 

but now she’s a cartography of herself 

and is of the plains, the veldts. 

Was so tiring without hills, but she’s learned 

to pace her steps, develops elevations in her head 

sidewinds like a rattler in the dry air.