Kendra DeColo
Bio
Kendra DeColo is the author of 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. Her poems and essays appear in Tin House Magazine, Waxwing, Los Angeles Review, Gulf Coast, VIDA, Bitch Magazine, and elsewhere. She has received awards and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Tennessee Arts Commission, and Split This Rock. She has been a visiting professor at Sarah Lawrence College, Vanderbilt University, and she is the co-host of the podcast RE/VERB: A Third Man Books Production. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.
Over the last three years I have been stealing moments and free time to write; while preparing to teach or on my phone while breastfeeding my daughter. This fellowship will widen the space I have to create within, giving me permission to explore vastness, possibility, and freedom in the work.
This fellowship is a way forward; a way to feel an abundance of time (a state that feels vital to writing), a way to bring more force and righteousness and rage to the project of “burning the frat house that is America to the ground.” And most of all, a way to be who I am: a mother and writer and the messy, impossible balance of being both.
I am grateful to have been given this support, which is a kind of permission, to continue to do this work and use it to widen spaces for others; to as Julio Cortázar writes, “let the pleasure we invent together be one more sign of freedom.”
"I am Thinking About the Movie Con Air"
I am thinking about the movie Con Air and my love
for Nicholas Cage, which is profound and focused
on the abundance of his hair, the way it trickles and recedes
to the middle of his scalp, chorusing down his back
with an unevenness that mirrors the body’s swollen
inadequacies, one of my breasts
whistling with milk while the other sleeps
flat against my chest, the asymmetrical
splendor a speaker swelling with fuzz and odd
time signatures, like half of my body
restored to its original form. I never met Nicholas Cage
but watched Con Air so many times I can conjure
the chiaroscuro dribble of his voice, blue smoke
lapping the edge of an extinguished star,
and imagine he, too, knows how to disguise
the body into something less fragile,
the tired meat of his heart striated
into a thousand directions like a smoldering compass
as when I gave birth the midwives praised my composure,
said their last patient clawed the bed like a raccoon,
and I wished instead to have given birth like a squid
shooting an ombre cage of ink and ovum
out of her orifice, ragged and deranged
with hormones, because didn’t I hold my daughter
and wish to be as feral as a raccoon
who knows love is the blunt metronome
of rummaging through trash, who doesn’t
think but throws her body into the labor of it?
In the last scene Nicholas Cage grips the pink bunny
he bought from commissary,
ripped-up and dripping with fuel,
and hands it to his daughter anyway
and I will watch it over again
to see him stand there bruised and lit
with the one good thing he has;
my left breast emptied while the other
floods with music,
soothing the vowel-starred tongue.
(Originally published in Waxwing, Spring 2018)