Kelly Gray

Night Study

1.  At 3am a peacock slips into your head,
gripped by all possible extinctions: 

The loss of the color blue, and the loss of the word florid,
erased silently and violently.

2.                You were so pretty when
you used to sleep,
like damp creeks beds giving way
to pools people would want to take their clothes off in.

3.                There is the predictable hardness only a small dig away.
He rides through the night like this.
A blood organ, a machine. 

4.                You ask to borrow it.
There is a small twist between oblige and obligate.
The O sounds you make with your mouth.
He falls back asleep. You do not, but now you smell like salt,
like something hidden and curled. Thoughtless as the fox screaming
in the distance, her cries the marker of her running.
But then you think, I should run like that, screaming through the neighborhood.

5.                The moonlight does not move. You don’t move either.
It stays luminous and you stay put.

A great tumbling into the wonder.

6.                You find your chest. You cough softly
so that the night can sleep.

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Kelly Gray is a writer and educator living with her family nine miles and seven fence posts away from the ocean, on the lands of Coast Miwok and Southern Kashaya Pomo people, deep in the redwood forest in a little cabin. Her collections include Instructions for an Animal Body (Moon Tide Press) and Tiger Paw, Tiger Paw, Knife, Knife (Quarter Press, Gold Medal winner from IPPY). She is the recipient of the Tusculum Review Chapbook Prize for her manuscript, The Mating Calls of the Specter, as well as the Neutrino Prize from Passages North. Most recently, she was a participant in the Kenyon Review Poetry Workshop and her writing has or will appear in Southern Humanities Review, Storm Cellar, Lake Effect, trampset, Rust & Moth, Harbor Review and Action, Spectacle. When she's not writing, she teaches with California Poets in the School at the elementary and high school level.