Kelsey Hoff

Morning Hesperus 

Dawn reflects in waves on the ceiling
and Hesperus opens her eyes,
crusted over with salt.

She surfaces with a gasp
from an ocean of Kleenex,
seaweed sheets grabbing her ankles.

Her heart is an anchor
and she walks around with it
clunking along the floor.

Her father says
“you look like a wreck.”




Lake Michigan Love Song


We drive down to the lake
for a melancholy's suicide proxy staycation,
for space to stare at a dashboard
and lap at the rocks of circumstance.
Waves of ambivalence are
hemmed in by the horizon,
the water, the shore, the sidewalk,
in beautiful solemn bleakness.

We hometown strangers congregate individually
in seagull kinship, sullen stargazers
at the wide wishing well of the wistful,
and wallow in the baptismal for bereavement,
loitering blasphemously at the shoreline
of holiness and life.
It's how we exercise.

We share a disconsolate need for
the feeling of chill through a warm sweater,
the irony of constant change,
disseminating connectedness mingling with the wind,
the feeling that you could disappear.

Kelsey Hoff is a poet emerging in Racine, WI who volunteers for the BONK! performance series, participates in a weekly writing group at the library, and enjoys reading at open mics. She has a BA in English from UW-Parkside and edits for The Bonkness Monster.