Summer '24
KELSEY CARMODY WORT
about local elections, mostly.
That the spiders with the small
legs are scarier than the big ones.
If she had won Camp Captain,
how the bandana would have felt
around her wrist. Folding chairs
planted in silty grass. Lucy thinks
too much, thinks on how she feels.
Feels like retraining the dog.
Walk off leash, sit with just
a look. If she’s abducted, who will
signal him to bite? Lucy runs because
Lucy doesn’t need to think. Knows
each cul-de-sac, how to dodge cars
in the four-way. Don’t touch me, she
prays. And sometimes, please fucking
do.
​
​
​
​
​
​
Sometimes even my life is too heavy-handed. As I swerve
off the highway on my way to Indianapolis, a sign I misread
as Flashback Creek snaps me into the past. So easily
I slip out of my body and into Paris, at the base of the Eiffel
Tower. Well, there it is, huh? We sit on a park bench for two
hours, waiting to be transformed. Walk through the Louvre
staring at paintings, each of us not wanting to be the first
to move onto the next. We must see something in this.
Mushroom ears. Bear sitting upright in snow. Terracotta
pitcher. Lamp without a bulb. Frayed pincushion. City
of love. When I direct the shot now, I ask for some hand-on-
cheek. Tell myself to thank you for hating that I brought a roller
bag, but still insisting on carrying it up the stairs anyway. To splurge
on a taxi when our host gives us the wrong address on the other
side of the city. When he left us the bottle of rosé, honey, why
didn’t we drink it? Three days we spent missing each other &
never touching until the night we chose McDonald’s, a cup of coffee
by the Seine, and cried in bed until suddenly we reached for each other again.
​
​
​
​
​
​
Kelsey Carmody Wort is a born Midwesterner and current New Yorker. Her work has been published in Southeast Review, Nashville Review, Smartish Pace, and other journals. She holds an MFA from Purdue University. She lives in and often writes about Chelsea, Manhattan.