Kaley Hutter
Kaley Hutter is a poet, scholar, and educator from Charlottesville, Virginia. Her poems have previously appeared or are forthcoming in The Harvard Advocate, Meridian, Funicular Magazine, and multiple other journals. Her scholarship focuses on contemporary poetics and language philosophy, and her current project explores a poetics of place in 1990s American women’s poetry. Kaley also teaches undergraduate composition and serves as an editor for the literary magazine LAMP. Her favorite color is that periwinkley part of the sky about 45 degrees above a Blue Ridge sunset.
My grandfather used to say glory!
as an expletive. As if every stubbed toe
dropped from the pelt of God. Once before
he died, in the hospital room of round
coral furniture, I cleaned his gums. Plunged
a cotton swab under his lips and hauled out
the glory! with the day-old vomit. The glory
was rubbery. I imagined coma dreams smoldering
at the edges, then blazing, with no metal morning
to snuff them out. Here, the space between
the chairs and the adults was thick with shredded
language. I probed the swab into his teeth.
Prod, thrust, sink. Ask if a grey man’s dreams
are built of burnable things. If he saw fire or water.
What the earth was made of after all, at the true
end of it. The glory was pliant. I carved it
from his gums like an organ. Light shorn
through the window slits as shrapnel,
and death crept the sill as a pet. I rehearsed
its taste, chewed my daughterhood and swallowed.
It burnt the back of my throat like scotch.
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