Emily Van Kley

poetry

Emily Van Kley is a queer poet and circus artist currently based in Olympia, Washington. Her poetry collections are The Cold and the Rust (2018), winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize, and Arrhythmia (2022), both from Persea Books. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry and Best New Poets, and has received the Loraine Williams Prize for Poetry, the Iowa Review Award, and the Florida Review Editor’s Award among other honors. When not writing, Emily can often be found teaching or performing aerial acrobatics as a member of Airbound Underground.

 

A Brief History of Scandal

Once, the zipper buzzed with the smut of invention: metal slit slick with discipline falling over itself to advertise the body beneath. Now, closing my raincoat gets no one’s feathers in a fluster. An unzipped fly: kind of germy, a fool’s blunder. We have to snake zippers down the backsides of blouses to imply a lover’s hands halving fabric. We have to extend the zipper bust to hem, sink it in latex, strip away its placket. I like a zipper placed on a bias, which means I am hot and not what you expected. Or that I enjoy geometry. When we were younger, my love and I bought women’s sleeping bags that zipped together, touched some corporate designer thought of us. We were less thought of, then. The bags were called mummies. Joined, they were suggestive and stifling. We’d tangle our legs as night fell but wake straining against separate cinches, arms stuck out side vents, sheltered close in our single garment, reaching away.

“ Maybe because I was raised as the child of a pastor in the socially conservative rural Midwest, maybe because I’m a person who believes intensely (and therefore finds the dissolution of belief especially intense), or maybe just because I live in a body in a society that has deeply conflicted ideas about gender and sexuality, my poetry lately has been working with themes of desire, shame, queerness, and religious (dis)belief. I find it fascinating that what signifies as sexy, dangerous, even shameful, changes over time or with a slight shift in context, which is—at least partly—what this poem is about. ”

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