Claudia Keelan..."I don't like it when I find myself responding to what somebody else has written...I'd rather respond to something I know nobody wrote, like a puddle..."
--Thylias Moss
The Scarlet Letter
After I left the scaffold I walked through the crowd, rights gone, the texts they quoted yelling after me meaningless beside my own blood Alpha, and her fleshy perfection screaming swaddled in my arms. I saw my future my Angelhood sprung from the imagined book of my author Not the Great American Novel you held sweating angry inside your incomprehensibility in high school classrooms But that tale of choice & retribution only history, not poetry, could record. Poetry bounced against the impenetrable wilderness attempting nature but She was artifice. She caressed the gaps of my story, my author's inability to love or hate me. I, on the contrary, was free inside my demarcations and systems, breath by line by heart by step leaving the settlement-- You see how it is with me. Even the hair I tucked into my cap was a concept, each sun struck strand hidden one of the...the ambiguities Your world continues to hover erotically around, fingering the silkiness. "The angel and apostle of the coming revelation must be a woman..." yes, & I'm achieving Art, disembodied inside the footsteps That stepped then into a puddle-- ugh, who wrote that?-- Shallow, natural hole, a surface with a mirror, all the townspeople's looking Crowding out my form as they gazed in steerage from that earthly hole.
Claudia Keelan's two collections of poetry are Refinery (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1994) and The Secularist (University of Georgia Press, 1997). She is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at University of Nevada - Las Vegas.
