Kelly Gray
I paint my fox-face with blood and chew through a couch that cost as much as a car. But what car, I keep thinking. They had driven me around in a gold-rimmed white Lexus while I practiced saying the word ostentatious, just like the woman had said it as she opened the car door. Ostentatious. Maybe the gaps between my canines make it hard to get the same pitch of gleefulness into ostentatious, it’s such a slippery word, where do you fit both the hiss and the squeal. We saw a mountain lion on the way back from the movie theater. That bastard, he rolled across the road and the first thing I noticed after his lazy shoulder walk was the sheer flexibility of his cat-wrists flipping each paw flat on asphalt. The Lexus rolled right up on him, he didn’t even side eye, he just kept walking. I wanted to break my fox jaw screaming from the backseat when the man’s back went rigid at being unnoticed. Maybe I am not a fox, and they are not not-foxes, maybe we are all skeletons in debt to unseen electrical frequencies. That night, I set about the work of cutting into my fox-self like a scientist marveling at the constellations found within my interior and my ability to remain numb as I gulp the stuffed clouds of couch cushions. I will tell you: that is control, that is a blade. That is not ostentatious at all.
#
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. 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), and she is the recipient of the Tusculum Review Chapbook Prize for her manuscript The Mating Calls of the Specter, which was judged by poet Justin Phillip Reed. Most recently, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Southern Humanities Review, Northwest Review, Rust & Moth, and Permafrost. When she’s not writing, she teaches with California Poets in the School at the elementary and high school level.