Mackensi Green
March 2025
Courtney Kelly is a queer writer and educator based in Reno, NV. Her poetry uses history and science as a lens through which we can frame and process the hardship and grief of living and, hopefully, find some comfort and hope within it. She is a member of Spoken Views Poetry Collective and has been a featured poet at the Utah Arts Festival, Nevada Humanities Literary Crawl, and She's On Fire Festival, among others. She runs a monthly generative poetry workshop as well as poetry workshops through Upward Bound at the University of Nevada, Reno. She has been a judge for the regional Poetry Out Loud competition since 2024. Her poetry appears in Is It Monday Yet? A Poetry Anthology (Moon Tide Press 2026). When she is not writing or teaching, you can find her reading for the Queerest Little Book Club that she runs, delving into increasingly obscure forms of fiber arts, and cross-country skiing and hiking in the beautiful Sierra Nevadas with her dog, Vanilly Bean.
THE SECOND FALL OF ROME
They didn’t invent milk chocolate until 1875, and a woman was shot in the face last night beside
her wife. It’s 536 CE, unbeknownst to you, a massive volcano erupted on the other side of the
world. What you do know is that the sky has been dark for a year, it is cold, famine has swept
through the land, and a plague is just beginning. You have never tasted sugar. You have never
witnessed queer joy. You pen the phrase “To live is to suffer; to die is a blessing.” The NHL is
playing songs from a show about gay hockey players, but they don’t allow their players to put
pride flags on their uniforms, and a woman was shot in the face last night beside her wife by a
man in a uniform. It is 476 CE, and Rome is falling, and I have never tasted chocolate, and the
best queer representation I’ve had in the last century was Nero, that fuck. Where the fuck is
Sappho? But the gay hockey players in this show got a happy ending, and the grocery store is
full of Kisses, and a woman was still shot in the face beside her wife by a man in a uniform while
she was trying to drive away, and I suppose there’s a poem in there
somewhere.
THE WEIGHT OF IT
Do you think geese know why they’re migrating?
Are there oral traditions sharing tales of warm lands
and plentiful harvest? Do they whisper warnings
about the cold and the hunger and that one free-thinker
who died of it? Or do they simply feel, in their guts
and their joints, an itch that will not abate until they fly?
I think the crows know. The same way the crows know
the weight of a death and how to mourn it. The same way
the crows know that we will trade food for a stolen trinket.
The crows know how to play– taunt my dog with a game
of peek-a-boo from the rooftop, swoop through the storm
in a tumbling exaltation, fill the bottle with stones until
the seeds float to the top. The crows know the power
of their voices. Weigh down branches with their bodies
and blacken the sky as they scream anger at danger.
But do the crows whisper, too? Of when the sky rained
glass– the way the fish breathed it through their gills
and died of internal lacerations? Do they remember
the winter that stretched for years, the sudden freeze,
the lizards curling around one another before they died?
Do they remember the layer of ash that settled, meters deep,
on everything– the burn of wings as they refused to descend
and be mired in the weight of it– the ones who fell.
Did they develop mourning rituals in the sky?
Do the crows carry the collective ancestral memory of being
the only things, perhaps the only living things, to have known
their world was ending? And did they learn from it?