Let’s Carry On. By Kelle Grace Gaddis

Help me through the valley low
below its bounds, not tree or
mountain, but bars hard before me,
not jail, the other kind neon signs
flashing “open” pulling me into
chaos, cold easy demon Champagne
bubbling with light stealing
reason, seasons, and life
Time’s an illusion, fiddling away
days until melancholy’s sad reflection
sees me, yet not me, older broken,
surprisingly still able to hope, or,
at least not ready to fashion a rope
Forgive me, friend, I know I shouldn’t
joke. My laughter’s from a glass before
noon, maybe two, so I can shimmer
like a glimmer of my misspent youth

Yellow Chair Review published Kelle Grace Gaddis’s first book, My Myths, in 2017. She’s recently published her second with Cyberwit titled, When I’m Not Myself. Other recently published works appear in Interim, BlazeVOX 15 & 17, Rye Whiskey Review, Chicken Soup For The Soul: Dreams & The Unexplainable, Dispatches Editions Resist Much / Obey Little, Vending Machine Presses Very Fine Writing, The Till, Five Willows Poetry Review, Thirteen Myna Birds Journal, Knot Literary Magazine, Entropy, DoveTales, and the forthcoming Fiction War Magazine Volume 8, 2019 and elsewhere. She was honored to be a Tupelo Press 30/30 Writer in 2018, a 4Culture “Poetry on the Buses” contest winner in 2015 and 2017, and a prize-winning finalist in the National Fiction War Contest in summer of 2018. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington in 2014.