24 Aug I Never Figured Out How to Get Free by Donika Kelly
The war was all over my hands.
I held the war, and I watched them
die in high definition. I could watch
anyone die, but I looked away. Still,
I wore the war on my back. I put it
on every morning. I walked the dogs
and they too wore the war. The sky
overhead was clear or it was cloudy
or it rained or it snowed, and I was rarely
afraid of what would fall from it. I worried
about what to do with my car, or how
much I could send my great-aunt this month
and the next. I ate my hamburger, I ate
my pizza, I ate a salad or lentil soup,
and this too was the war.
At times I was able to forget that I
was on the wrong side of the war,
my money and my typing and sleeping
sound at night. I never learned how
to get free. I never learned how
not to have anyone’s blood
on my own soft hands.
About the Poet
photo credit Ladan Osman
Donika Kelly is the author of The Natural Order of Things (Graywolf Press, 2025); The Renunciations (Graywolf Press, 2021), winner of the Anisfield-Wolf book award in poetry; and Bestiary (Graywolf, 2016), the winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and a Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Kelly’s poetry has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Publishing Triangle Awards, the Lambda Literary Awards, and longlisted for the National Book Award. A Cave Canem graduate fellow, National Endowment for the Arts fellow, and Pushcart Prize winner, 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. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Donika lives in Iowa City with her wife, the nonfiction writer Melissa Febos, and is an associate professor in the English Department at the University of Iowa.
This poem appears in Donika’s new collection The Natural Order of Things.
Related Event
- On Saturday, August 30th at 7:30 p.m., Donika Kelly will join poet Nabila Lovelace as featured performers at a Just Buffalo Literary Center Silo City Reading Series event also featuring a musical performance by Austin, Texas-based singer-songwriter and producer Charlie Martin, and an installation by interdisciplinary visual artist Nicole Chochrek. Silo City Reading Series events take place in Marine A grain elevator, behind Duende at Silo City, 85 Silo City Row. Doors open at 7 p.m., and the events begin at 7:30 p.m. Books by featured poets in the series will be available for purchase by Buffalo-based bookseller Fitz Books.
The Poem of the Week feature is curated by literary legacy awardee R.D. Pohl.