The Keys to the Jail

The Keys to the Jail asks the question of who is to blame for all we’ve lost, calling us to reexamine the harsh words of failed love, the aging of a once-beautiful body, even our own voracious desires. Keetje Kuipers is a poet of daring leaps and unflinching observations, whose richly textured lyrics travel from Montana’s great wildernesses to the ocean-fogged streets of San Francisco as they search out the heart that’s lost its way.<BR><BR>Dolores Park<BR><BR>In the flattening California dusk,<BR>women gather under palms with their bags<BR><BR>of bottles and cans. The grass is feathered<BR>with the trash of the day, paper napkins<BR><BR>blowing across the legs of those who still<BR>drown on a patchwork of blankets. Shirtless<BR><BR>in the phosphorescent gloom of streetlamps,<BR>they lie suspended. This is my one good<BR><BR>life—watching the exchange of embraces,<BR>counting the faces assembled outside<BR><BR>the ice-cream shop, sweet tinge of urine by<BR>the bridge above the tracks, broken bike lock<BR><BR>of the gay couple’s hands, desperate clapping<BR>of dark pigeons—who will take it from me?<BR><BR>A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry, Keetje Kuipers's debut collection, Beautiful in the Mouth, won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. She has been the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident, and is currently an assistant professor at Auburn University.<BR>