The Draughtsman

Image of Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Vega 5B, courtesy Smithsonian Open Access.

It started with propellers

in your absence, men.

I stepped into the role,

and imagination

came in precise torrents,

ideas like hail,

the beauty of propulsion.

Substitution led to invention,

a life given to hours at the table;

I was allowed room to create,

to rise and join ranks,

while men killed men

in fields, water, sky.

Steadily, my hand wedded paper,

designing, analyzing, building,

filled with locomotive energy,

my mathematical mind traversed

the span of two world wars.

See, girls of this new millennium,

you can do this:

lead, defy, excel.

So, while you were away, men,

I spent the hours focused on the forward.

The Draughtsman was written in honor of Verena Winifred Holmes (1889-1964), an English engineer who was a trailblazer in her field during World War I and World War II, and beyond. The poem was composed in response to a creative writing call for submissions by Medway Libraries, UK, for its Circle of Six Women Project, and was selected for inclusion in its anthology, "Inspired by Six Women who Shook the World" (2023), where the poem first appeared.

The Draughtsman, Copyright © 2022 by Donna Kathryn Kelly

The Governor

Image of artist Charles Demuth’s drawing, Boxer, courtesy Smithsonian Open Access.

Did you shadowbox in your cell?

Upbeat—chipper, even—

perfect hair

like Warren’s werewolf:

When you were swinging at air

surrounded by Colorado concrete,

did you think,

How the f - - - did it come to this?

A winter dawn,

you’re readying for a run,

and instead,

under cover of darkness,

the FBI comes to your door,

apprehends you;

removes you

from your home,

your wife,

your children.

There’s an indignation

that comes to an

interrupted runner,

waylaid by external forces:

a pulled hamstring,

an intrusive text that leads to another,

an unanticipated storm,

a federal arrest warrant.

You may not have seen it coming—

probably didn’t.

After all,

it’s not as though

you took a bulldozer to Meigs Field

while Chicago was sleeping.

Handcuffs for you, Governor.

No polite turning-yourself-in.

No surrendering-on-the-warrant.

No cozy deals for you, Governor.

You pissed off both parties:

the one that controls the State,

and the one that doesn’t.

Not a good place to be.

But I’m a scrapper,

you thought,

a fighter,

you thought,

this is bullshit,

you thought,

I can beat this,

you thought.

You thought wrong.

If,

If,

If,

If only.

You ended up with pen time,

lots of it:

time to read Kipling,

time to run in small circles

through a western courtyard,

time to replay the trial

and your testimony

and the closing arguments

over and over again.

You acclimated to this life,

because the prison is the ring:

the smell of sweat and compressed flesh,

the desire of movement in a confined space,

the loneliness of an ancient sport of fury.

Did you bob and weave

against the wall,

pretending there was

a bony-faced phantom

from Springfield

facing you?

Long days,

you spent in the cell;

years passed by,

running in a slow circle,

time moving like

a courtroom clock,

a glacial appeal.

It’s the sport,

not the law,

that brought comfort,

the retreat into the imagination,

the mirage of youth,

reminiscence:

the scissoring of feet,

the jabbing of air,

the crushing of want,

the punching of worry,

the prosecution of time

in a liminal space.

The Governor, Copyright © 2023 by Donna Kathryn Kelly

One Year Out

Image of Untitled (Seascape) pencil drawing by patent attorney and artist Howard Russell Butler (1856-1934), courtesy Smithsonian Open Access.

This is how it ends for him:
no funeral, no battle hymn,
just water absorbed into the lungs,
dragging him into an ice-cold tomb,

limitless gallons of titanic weight,
crushing breath with fists of fate.
One year out
is met with doom.

Stern sinks in eight, but he goes longer,
combating the chill of terror-water.
He shoulders through a mass of waves,
through gulps of salty-death to save
as many hearts and hands, he sees-
as many cries as he perceives.
One year out
is all God gives.

Numb his lips, and all tread ceases;
his limbs immobile, his mind releases
the sounds of an Alabama summer:
songbirds, fishing lines, the voice of his mother.
He wills death away to save more men yet,
Temporary is the swim; infinite is the depth.
One year out
is all he gets.

One Year Out, a poem in remembrance of Lieutenant Stanton F. Kalk, United States Navy, was first published by Southern Arizona Press in its anthology, The Poppy: A Symbol of Remembrance, September 2022.

Stanton F. Kalk (1894-1917), Lieutenant (Junior Grade), United States Navy, graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1916. He was killed in action the following year, when a German submarine fired a torpedo that struck the USS Jacob Jones on which Kalk was on board, sinking the American destroyer. Kalk survived the blast and heroically swam from raft to raft moving survivors in an effort to save them by equalizing the weight of the life rafts. In doing so, Kalk died of exhaustion and exposure. Kalk was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Medal. [Historical Source: Naval History and Heritage Command site, www.history.navy.mil.]

One Year Out, Copyright © 2022 by Donna Kathryn Kelly

Things the Internet has Ruined (Gift-Giving)

Image of Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931), by artist Alfred S. Seer, Engraver, Copy after Mathew B. Brady, courtesy Smithsonian Open Access.

The giving was once as

magical as the receiving,

such that I was thrilled to find

that gold and black floor-to-ceiling satin wall shroud of The Lizard King

before The Material Girl had become immaterial—

(Oh, how I had loved the musky moon-scent

of her irreverent cassette tape back in her Brunette Age!)

Objects had meaning then:

they were desired, displayed,

perhaps, even respected in some way

such that when my mom’s friend’s husband

proudly showed us his basement collection

of Marion Morrison commemorative treasures

a few months before he was sentenced to the federal penitentiary

for a paper crime of some sort,

I was not able to search online and find out

that there were hundreds,

or even thousands, of these so-called limited-edition prints,

faux bronze-busts, and oil paintings available,

and that these precious pieces were really

worthless, to everyone, but the pre-trial releasee,

(who probably ended up selling these images of a late-middle-aged man

in a cowboy hat and a pink bandana

at a garage sale in the south suburbs

for under a hundred dollars—cumulatively!)

But now, we have Bezos, Facebook, and eBay,

and we can all check on the price of things—

instantaneously—

so pretty much nothing has value.

We can search for the worth of a gift in a second:

swap it,

sell it,

return it,

or throw it away.

There is nothing mysterious about any object anymore.

Before I had my driver’s license

my mother would drop L. and me off

at the Crystal Point Mall;

we would flip through the album covers at the music store,

LP after LP at our fingertips.

Sometimes I couldn’t find the new release—

the one I had seen on MTV at L.’s house—

and when I would ask about it, the store clerk would look bored.

He would say it was “Sold Out,”

and that it would be days,

maybe even a whole week,

until the store would get a new shipment,

from New York or California,

or some other place that sounded really far away,

and really was.

In truth, there was something magical

about that want of a material thing,

being followed by deprivation:

the desire to possess an object that was unattainable—

not because of its price—but because of its inaccessibility.

In the present, everything is available on-demand,

such that when I go to buy elk sausage in downtown Sioux Falls,

to ship to an Illinoisan for Christmas,

and learn that it is out of stock,

I simply go online and order it from another store.

The gift is supposed to be true.

South Dakota:

prairie-pure,

unbroken.

Instead, for all I know the gift may be shipped

from Elk Grove Village to Palatine,

so that there is nothing unique about this computerized order.

We have become

an isolated, robotic, world market.

The glow of gift-giving has been diminished in some way.

The connecting of human face,

human hand,

human soul,

is forgotten:

just as the days when there were full-service gas stations,

and men in jumpsuits with names like “Lou” or “Rick”

would come out to your car to pump your gas,

squeegee your windows,

and put air in your tires,

and there are things like this

that you only miss

when you randomly

come across

something that once brought you minor joy,

but is now obsolete,

though it was once commonplace,

before the Internet destroyed humanity;

kind of like last summer when I pulled

into the Sinclair in Pierre

and I discovered that full-service is not extinct

and I took out my stupid cell phone

to film the guy cleaning my windshield

as though I had found the remains of some

great prehistoric shark fossilized beneath the gas pumps,

and I kept repeating,

“I didn’t know they still had these.”

I was simply ecstatic.

It was like the moment I saw the bald eagles

flying outside of La Crosse above the bluffs,

or when a bobcat jogged across my path

at dusk along Bull Valley Road

or the time I spotted Joan Jett

stepping into a limo at the Des Plaines Oasis

and I wasn’t quite sure it was her,

because it was drizzling and dark

and I was a hundred feet away,

and all I could see was a slim body

and black leather

and hair the color of the night.

So, I called out, “Hey, are you someone famous?”

and her voice globe-saluted at me,

strong and distinct

like a double-axed cherry bomb,

taunting the tollway traffic, “Don’t you know who I am?”

And when I shouted, “Joan Jett!”

she pointed a finger,

fired, and said,

“You’ve got it.”

Then, she just disappeared:

this shapeshifting raven,

deliquesced into the dark vehicle,

down the exit ramp,

onto I-90,

into the wet night.

I didn’t take a video of this to post onto Facebook

because there weren’t cell phones back then,

and this was years before some politician invented the Internet,

such that I did not sprint over to Joan Jett to pose alongside her,

to take some awkward photo to impress all of my not-really friends.

Instead, I have this:

the voice,

jagged and defiant,

the crow’s wing bangs,

the parking-lot lights,

kicking against a shock

of might and beauty.

You see, the memory holds

such things still,

and it will always be better than a cell phone.

Things the Internet has Ruined (Gift-Giving) first appeared in Oakwood, Volume 5, Issue 1, (2023).

Things the Internet has Ruined (Gift-Giving) Copyright © 2019 by Donna Kathryn Kelly

An ekphrastic poem inspired by the oil painting, PEACE IN UNION, by artist, Thomas Nast, 1895

Image of Winslow Homer’s The Surgeon at Work at the Rear during an Engagement, from Harper’s Weekly, July 12, 1862, courtesy Smithsonian Open Access.

The incivility,

the cleaving,

the grotesqueness of an electric-chair sky,

heads, necks, fingers,

falling to fury,

 a nation of lost statues

and amnesiac stars,

tumbling into the forgetting,

sleeping beneath an overpass

in an overcrowded city.

Even with a resolution

we are still severed;

the media doctors divide

our flesh into blue and red,

use polls like weapons,

alter the history of the heart,

incite trauma, replicate pain

across sad centuries,

a gangrenous legacy,

a night weeping on fields.

Knees, wrists, throats,

intergenerational cellblocks,

the fatalities of grief,

ballads of discordant verse,

drifting as wounded clouds

above an anxious nation:

on edge

and wary,

like a compelled handshake

between enemy generals.

This poem was selected by a jury to be included in the 2022 Friendswood Library Ekphrastic Poetry Festival in Friendswood, Texas. The poem was inspired by Thomas Nast’s 1895 oil painting, Peace in Union, which depicts Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at the Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865. The image on this page is that of the artwork of Winslow Homer which is displayed at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., and is made available via Smithsonian Open Access.

Thomas Nast’s original oil painting, Peace in Union, is displayed at the Galena & U.S. Grant Museum in the town of Galena, Illinois. The precision of detail and the range of facial expressions captured by Thomas Nast in his work, reflect the tension and emotion of that moment in the history of the Republic.

An ekphrastic poem, Copyright © 2022 Donna Kathryn Kelly

Things the Internet has Ruined (Hope)

Image of artwork “Hope” by Francesco Bartolozzi (1727–1815) After Johann Heinrich Ramberg (1763 – 1840), courtesy Smithsonian Open Access.

Before the Internet, people just died

and maybe you didn’t know they had died

because the last you heard they had moved somewhere

like Fort Myers or Punta Gorda

and they passed out of your life with ease,

so that sometimes you might pause

to think of something that they had said or did

which would cause you to smile

and then you would wonder what happened to them,

so that you would think that they were sitting on a beach somewhere

sipping a cocktail and watching waves

while you were stuck in Belle Fourche still working the same job

you’ve been working for twenty years,

and you might have felt some envy, but mostly, you were comforted

with the thought that someday you would also be on a beach somewhere

sipping a margarita and watching the waves.

Now, when you have the memory of a person,

you wonder whatever happened to them,

and where did they move to,

so, you search their name on your stupid phone or your laptop

and you find out that they are not sipping a Rum and Coke in Pensacola

but that they are dead

and have been dead for years.

The unknowing of a death is gone:

accessibility

has destroyed tranquility.

Which is what happened when I searched for my old secretary,

who had moved to Florida before the Millennium,

and saw that she had died seven years ago,

and all this time I had not thought of her often,

except to share the joke we had played on her stalker cop-ex-boyfriend

or to think of her chipmunk happiness, her adorable face,

her independence:

the reinvention of herself after forty, after divorce.

This time has passed, not seeming like years at all,

unless a year becomes a day or an hour at this age,

and all the while I have thought she was wearing a sarong,

shopping at Coldwater Creek, listening to Jimmy Buffett songs,

with a man of some wealth and more years, or no wealth and less years,

laughing alongside her,

and I wonder what she died from, and I hope she did not suffer,

but mostly, I want to hold her in the present,

the ocean-side, now-should-be-sixty-ish-imp,

that this awful screen has stolen from me.

Things the Internet has Ruined (Hope) first appeared in Oakwood, Vol. 4, Issue 9 (2019).

The poem subsequently appeared in Snapdragon: A Journal of Art & Healing, Winter 2021 Edition.

Things the Internet has Ruined (Hope) Copyright © 2019 by Donna Kathryn Kelly

Three Lost Technicolor Seconds

A Shakespearean Sonnet to Louise Brooks (1906-1985)

Image of torn sidewall courtesy Smithsonian Open Access.

Androgynous Kansas, taut earth stretching

toward pomegranate sky; grace goes the girl

from fields to stage; dust-bowl far fetching,

gossamer-laced sprite in summer-down swirl.

Seductive soil births dreams, twirling dance,

gamine ventriloquist-self without chords;

cool-draped wrists, softest flight, red-curtain chance,

winking gem, twister soul’s unspoken words.

Flapper stars falling, reckless nights hold her,

bare-midriff fields, fade takes the glimmer,

lost-cardigan world, soft goes the shoulder;

time, the sultry smile seizes dimmer.

American Venus, draped in velvet,

the world’s Pandora, girl in black helmet.

Three Lost Technicolor Seconds first appeared in “The Stars and Moon in the Evening Sky Anthology,” published by Southern Arizona Press (2022).

Three Lost Technicolor Seconds Copyright © 2022 by Donna Kathryn Kelly

November Four Seven Bravo Alpha

Image of artist Franklin Booth’s pen and ink drawing, THE SAHARA, courtesy Smithsonian Open Access.

Two years before each of us

became an eyewitness to events

we could not foresee-

could not-

still cannot-

will never-

fully fathom,

there was another

unsettling blue sky,

another distance,

another autumnal flight of fate

to which we were riveted,

anchored by our united

powerlessness,

reminded of the subordinate

nature of our selves,

taught by the plane’s

unnavigated path

that just as clouds morph

and disappear:

So, go we.

The scope of our authority

is limited,

extremely, constantly;

and it rides on circumstances,

such as the sudden

loss of cabin pressure

at a high altitude.

See, our breaths

can be stolen

in a matter of seconds.

See, even we can drown

thousands of feet

above the oceans.

Golf is a game where the

slightest makes the difference:

the tweak of the lower back,

the placement of the thumb,

the spread of the feet

at a not-so-superstitious distance,

the clarity of image

of the end of an airborne flight.

The swing is more about grace,

than power.

Our hour is unknown to us

and it may come

after a time of redemption-

or not-

but this is common to all of us:

its arrival is never convenient.

We structure the entirety

of our days around numbers -

on the top right-hand corner

of a work computer,

or on the over-populated face

of a cell phone,

or on a VCR, or a microwave -

digits marking our arrival

or departure from a school,

our arrival or departure

from a workplace,

the arrival of

a certified nursing assistant

to wheel us

to the bathroom or to bingo.

In truth, it is time

that regulates us,

and our most important meeting

is unscheduled.

Four months before the Learjet

descended into the ground

at a hundred times the force of gravity

two miles southwest of Mina,

scarring the field with a

ten-foot deep crater,

Payne Stewart studied a slope,

calculated distance,

force,

grade.

It was an uphill putt,

and when he landed it

softly into the cup,

there was the celebratory

lunging of the body,

the throwing, sans javelin,

of fist to air,

the iconic mule-kick

of the right leg.

He stood,

in the drizzle,

his forearms bare,

calves-covered

to plus-fours’ edge

with white socks,

answering questions

into a microphone,

with a serene distraction,

that seemed like subdued joy,

and he said,

“Phil’s going to have

his opportunities again,

mine might be on the short list.”

At first,

when news of the

northwest-bound plane

was broadcast,

the occupants’ names

were not disclosed.

We were told that a Learjet

had taken off from Orlando,

that it was supposed

to be headed to Texas,

that its crew

was unresponsive

shortly after takeoff,

and that it was cruising

on autopilot,

a ghost plane,

over the heartland.

There was a professional

golfer onboard.

This news was as mysterious,

as it was horrific,

and then,

when his identity was reported,

it was inconceivable.

The flight time was

three hours and fifty-four minutes.

The jet cut across

Mississippi and Tennessee,

passed over Payne Stewart’s

birth state of Missouri,

pitched high above Iowa,

and spiraled downward

into a field in Edmunds County,

underneath a sheet of reeling

South Dakota sky.

See, we cannot think

of everything.

See, we do not even know

where our final resting place will be.

November Four Seven Bravo Alpha first appeared in the Spring 2020 Edition of Pasque Petals.

The poem was the Third Place entry in the 2020 South Dakota State Poetry Society’s Annual Poetry Contest (Landscape Category).

November Four Seven Bravo Alpha Copyright © 2019 by Donna Kathryn Kelly