BIO
Blossom Kelley is a poet, essayist and second year master’s student at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where she is studying the relationship between prescriptive grammar and social inequality. Her complicated relationship with her racial identity as a Black and Jewish woman has been her main source of artistic and academic inspiration. A lifelong New Yorker, Blossom has witnessed first-hand the inaccessibility of resources due to a clearly defined, yet often invisible, language barrier hindering the psychological and social development of individuals which subsequently repeats the inequality cycle. Although she is originally from Harlem, Blossom is now a Bronx resident who is committed to sharing the beauty and complexity that exists in New York’s forgotten borough.
Tender moments
I’ve waited all day for this moment. I suspend my legs in time and space as tiny fingertips touch to
trace everywhere you’ve been before. Though this journey is not the same. The earth beneath, she
yearns to be retraced
By depth. By joy.
She screams within to be held, to be crushed beneath desire and the urge to flee.
I shush her swiftly, dropping my hand to my thigh. I convulse. I’m disgusted with her. Yet in this
disgust, in this filth, and utter exasperation,
I still want it. I still want the pleasure. I yearn to feel alive and bright under the moonlight of my own
sensation. But my moon, la pobrecita, she becomes the sun in rage, burning through years of
expectation, lurking behind the force of lust prying, splaying my knees across oceans full of
consequential thrusts and preenings.
It’s fucked man. It’s so fucked.
I love so deep, so raw, so profound. I can shake this very room through the power of sensation.
But my body, separate from me, this entity... She only learned to lust through force.
And you. Your tenderness, your essence of respect and pleasant distance, baby. I swear to god it
makes me swoon.
But my body... My earth. My pillaged, soiled dirt, she -
She’s just not used to this.
I imagine your lips,
Soft.
With words
You’ll never speak.
The dream of you
And me
Together in oblivion
Drenched
In our innocence
I know will never be.
Only in my dreams
Are you ever truly
Close
To me.
I have no
Vulnerability
We can never love forreal.