Kendra DeColo

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Kendra DeColo is the author of three poetry collections, I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers From the World (BOA Editions, 2021), My Dinner with Ron Jeremy (Third Man Books, 2016) and Thieves in the Afterlife (Saturnalia Books, 2014), selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the 2013 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. She is also co-author of Low Budget Movie (Diode, 2021), a collaborative chapbook written with Tyler Mills. She has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Millay Colony, Split this Rock, and the Tennessee Arts Commission. Her poems and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, Tin House Magazine, Waxwing, Los Angeles Review, Bitch Magazine, VIDA, and elsewhere. She has performed her work in comedy clubs and music venues including the Newport Folk Festival, and she has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Vanderbilt University, and the Tennessee Prison for Women. She currently teaches at The Hugo House and lives in Nashville, Tennessee. Source

Poem That Gives No Fucks

A poem should be heavy metal

worn as armor when the world hurts.

Should be a jangly guitar arpeggio

draping the highway or blue jay pecking apart

a robin’s egg, crisp blue fragments split with red.

A poem should be a Lisa Frank unicorn

vomiting rainbows who makes you ask:

how do I continue to do what I hate

day in and day out, and then answers

“Bitch, one day you’re going to grow wings

so stop screaming into the 22nd century.

Get nasty, mechanize the messy.

Reinvent your pussy into a box of butterflies.”

Because if a poem isn’t god’s tooth

tonguing you for gold then it’s only a half moonwalk,

only a date with the toilet and last night’s chardonnay.

A poem should feel like an encyclopedia

chewed up by stray dogs behind a Tiger Mart.

Seductive as a saint with truck driver hands.

Should glint like a prayer made of bodily fluids,

make you want to burn all your clothes,

eat yourself alive, smother your heart

and say: I've been searching

for the blues my whole damn life.

Published:

2021

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

Themes:

Ars Poetica

Humor & Satire

Literary Devices:

Allusion

an expression designed to call something to mind without mentioning it explicitly; an indirect or passing reference

Dialogue

conversation between two or more people as a feature of a book, play, or movie

Metaphor

a comparison between two unrelated things through a shared characteristic

Personification

the attribution of human qualities to a non-human thing

Simile

a comparison between two unlike things using the words “like” or “as”