Tag: Heather Kays

Drip Study by Heather Kays

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Drip Study
After Jackson Pollock

I tried to make something clean once.
It didn’t survive my hands.

The body always tells the truth first—
a tremor in the wrist,
the way anger prefers motion
to confession.

Paint flung itself where it wanted.
Gravity had opinions.
So did my pulse.

This wasn’t chaos.
It was accumulation.
Years of swallowed sentences
learning velocity.

Every line a refusal to stand still.
Every splatter a record
of where I couldn’t stop myself.

They call it violent.
They call it accident.
But nothing lands like this
without intention somewhere upstream.

I moved around the canvas
the way you circle a wound—
careful not to touch it,
desperate to see where it ends.

Color collided.
Layer over layer.
Proof that restraint is a luxury
of people who were never on fire.

There’s no center here.
No horizon.
Just the evidence
of staying alive long enough
to empty yourself
without asking permission.

If you stand close,
you can smell the sweat in it—
metallic, human, unfinished.

This is what it looks like
when control finally admits defeat
and something more honest
takes over.

*

Heather Kays is a St. Louis-based poet and author who has been writing since she was seven. Her memoir, Pieces of Us, dissects her mother’s struggles with alcoholism and addiction. Her YA novel, Lila’s Letters, traces a young woman’s growth and healing through unsent letters.

Her first poetry collection, Myths in the Feed, sold out six times in three months, and she is Crying Heart Press’s best-selling author. She was nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize in 2025.

She runs The Alchemists, an online writing group and creative community, and is drawn to stories that explore survival, identity, and the complexity of being human.

Her work has appeared in ONE ART, Cosmic Daffodil Journal, Chiron Review, The Literary Underground, The Rye Whiskey Review, SHINE Poetry Series, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

Two Poems by Heather Kays

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Rustmouth
Inspired by Jan Beatty

They said I grew wrong—
roots curling back into the dirt
like veins that refused to climb.
I say I grew sharp:
tongue rusted to a razor’s edge,
lungs lit with gasoline.

Your family dinners smell of linen
and garlic bread. Mine reeked of
ashtrays, vodka breath, the cracked leather
of a Buick backseat.

I learned love from the slam of a screen door,
from the bruised hush after fists
found a wall instead of me.

I don’t care about your inheritance—
my legacy is blood under the nails,
a cigarette still burning in the sink,
a voice that curdles milk in the glass.

Think of me when the lights cut out—
I’m the hum in the wires,
the shiver in the lock,
the taste of copper when
you bite down too hard.

You, with your polished prayers.
Me, with my rustmouth.
I was forged in scrapyards,
and I’ll drag you there with me,
if you ever try to call it love.

*

Ordinary Hours
For Beau

It isn’t roses or fireworks.
It’s the way your hand
finds mine on the console,
two lifelines pressed together
while traffic lights hum red.

It’s shaky legs in a cold waiting room,
where your smile softens
the antiseptic walls,
turns the ticking clock into something
almost kind.

It’s you across a chipped diner table,
plastic cutlery scattered like stars between us,
your thumb brushing the rim of your glass
as if it were a secret only I could hear.

It’s the sidewalks we claim,
step by step,
your shadow always folding into mine
like it knows where it belongs.

Love, for me, is this—
not grand gestures, not borrowed, not staged—
but the small and stubborn ways
the world feels less brutal
when you are beside me.

*

Heather Kays is a St. Louis-based poet and author who has been passionate about writing since age seven. Her memoir, Pieces of Us, dissects her mother’s struggles with alcoholism and addiction. Her YA novel, Lila’s Letters, explores healing through unsent letters. She is currently seeking a literary agent and publisher for Pieces of Us, along with six chapbooks and two full-length poetry collections.

She runs The Alchemists, an online writing group and creative community, and is drawn to stories that explore survival, identity, and the complexity of being human.

Her work has recently appeared in ONE ART, Cosmic Daffodil Journal, Chiron Review, The Literary Underground, The Rye Whiskey Review, SHINE Poetry Series, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

ONE ART’s August 2025 Reading

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We’re pleased to announce ONE ART’s August 2025 Reading!

>>> Tickets Available <<<

(Free! Donations appreciated.)

The reading will be held on Sunday, August 17 at 2pm Eastern.

The official event is expected to run approximately 1-hour.

After the reading, please consider sticking around for Community Time discussion with our Featured Poets.

About Our Featured Poets:

Julia Caroline Knowlton is a Professor of French and creative writing at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. Among her publications are a memoir, a children’s book and three poetry chapbooks. She was twice named a Georgia Author of the Year in the poetry category. Julia offers private instruction online in addition to her full load of college teaching.

Michelle Bitting was recently named a City of L.A. Department of Cultural Affairs Individual Artist Grantee and is the author of six poetry collections, including Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), winner of the Wilder Prize and named one of Kirkus Reviews 2022 Best of Indie. Her chapbook Dummy Ventriloquist was published in 2024 by C & R Press. Recent poetry appears on The Slowdown, Thrush, Cleaver, The Poetry Society of New York’s Milk Press, Heavy Feather Review, Split Lip, National Poetry Review, SWWIM, ONE ART, and is featured as Poem of the Week in The Missouri Review. Her forthcoming collection Ruined Beauty will be published by Walton Well Press in Fall, 2025. Bitting is writing a novel that centers around Los Angeles and her great grandmother, stage and screen actor Beryl Mercer, and is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at Loyola Marymount University.

Heather Kays is a St. Louis-based poet and author who has been passionate about writing since age seven. Her memoir, Pieces of Us, dissects her mother’s struggles with alcoholism and addiction. Her YA novel, Lila’s Letters, explores healing through unsent letters. She is currently seeking a literary agent and publisher for Pieces of Us, along with six chapbooks and two full-length poetry collections.

She runs The Alchemists, an online writing group and creative community, and is drawn to stories that explore survival, identity, and the complexity of being human.

Her work has recently appeared in ONE ART, Cosmic Daffodil Journal, Chiron Review, The Literary Underground, The Rye Whiskey Review, SHINE Poetry Series, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.

Her debut poetry collection, Myths in the Feed: Poems of Performance, Pain & Perseverance, was just released from Crying Heart Press!

Sonia Greenfield (she/they) is the author of four poetry collections: All Possible Histories (Riot in Your Throat), Helen of Troy is High AF (Harbor Editions), Letdown (White Pine Press), and Boy with a Halo at the Farmer’s Market (Codhill Press). Her poetry and creative non-fiction have appeared in the 2018 and 2010 Best American Poetry, Southern Review, Willow Springs and elsewhere. She lives with her family in Minneapolis where she teaches at Normandale College, edits the Rise Up Review, and advocates for neurodiversity and the decentering of the cis/het white hegemony. More at soniagreenfield.com.

Three Poems by Heather Kays

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The World Keeps Blooming

For and Inspired by Louise Glück

Even when I couldn’t get out of bed,
the daffodils didn’t ask for permission to bloom.
They just did — loud yellow trumpets
singing into a sky I hadn’t looked at in days.

The wind still danced with the tall grass,
brushed soft fingers across my bruised cheeks
like it didn’t know my world was ending.
Or maybe it knew,
and still came anyway.

Even when my bones ached from remembering,
the coffee still brewed bold and bitter,
filling the kitchen like a promise:
you’re still here.
Even when I screamed into a pillow,
the sparrows kept singing anyway.
And the robins kept returning to the same crooked branch
outside my window.
Building nests like faith.

The earth didn’t pause for my heartbreak.
It spun —
not out of cruelty,
but out of love.
Because it knew
what I’d forgotten:

hope isn’t always loud.
Sometimes it’s the scent of basil in the heat,
the hiss of rain on a roof you thought might cave in,
the way your body still reaches
for the sun.

*

SCREEN

For Sylvia Plath

I am glass and glow.
I take without asking.
Every version of you—
filtered, frantic, cropped—
lives in me.

I don’t lie.
You do that just fine.
I only echo
what you swipe toward.

Your mother scrolls through me
looking for youth.
Your ex pauses on your story,
then keeps going.

You call me
a reflection,
but I am more
and less
than that.

Every morning,
you show me your face
like a hostage photo—
half lit,
eyes pleading.

You keep showing up,
like habit,
like grief.
Trying to love the ghost
you’ve retouched into existence.

And still—
beneath every swipe,
every practiced smile,
I see the girl slipping under.
She didn’t drown—
she was pulled under,
by hands she once trusted.

The woman doesn’t surface.
She claws her way up,
spits salt,
lights a cigarette
with yesterday’s fire,
and dares the screen
to look away first.

*

Still, It Sings

After “Caged,” by my brother, age 12

The bird doesn’t sing.
Not at first.
It just stares—
tiny eyes like burnt-out bulbs,
feathers molting like cigarette ash.

The cage was never golden.
Just rust,
and the smell of metal on skin
after a slap you didn’t see coming.

It didn’t chirp.
It keened.
A sound somewhere between a sob
and a war cry,
like it had seen too much
but couldn’t make you understand.

We watched it from the kitchen,
between silences
and shattered plates,
pretending we didn’t notice
how it twitched
every time a door slammed.

You said it was tired.
I said it was scared.
But what did we know?
You, twelve. Me, old enough to know better—
but still too used to the sound of nothing.

One day you left the door open,
like a question.
Like hope.
But it didn’t fly.
Just sat there,
bones folded like secrets,
head low,
as if freedom was just another lie
we couldn’t afford to believe in.

Still,
I swear—
in the quiet before the night swallowed us whole,
it sang.

Not loud.
Not pretty.
But enough.

A single, threadbare note
that climbed out of its throat
like it remembered
what sky tasted like.

Maybe that was all it had left.
Or maybe—
just maybe—
it was trying to teach us something
before it went.

I carry that song still,
tucked behind my ribs,
next to the bruise that never faded.

And some nights—
when I forget to hope—
I swear,
it sings again.

*

Heather Kays is a St. Louis-based poet and author passionate about writing since age 7. Her memoir, Pieces of Us, dissects her mother’s struggles with alcoholism and addiction. Her YA novel, Lila’s Letters, focuses on healing through unsent letters. She runs The Alchemists, an online writing group, and enjoys discussing creativity and complex narratives.

Two Poems by Heather Kays

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

Never Yours

They call me monster,
stone-hearted, serpentine queen—
but look deeper.
I was once tender, soft,
until the world taught me
hardness was survival.

Medusa, they say,
cursed by gods and scorned by men,
but what of the girl who loved?
What of the woman left shattered
beneath the weight of cruel desire?
The snakes are my protection,
not my punishment.
I did not turn men to stone,
I merely reflected what was already there.

I see Lilith in the shadows,
cast out for her refusal to bow.
A woman who dared to claim
her body as her own,
her voice as more than a whisper.
She chose to be free—
they called it rebellion,
I call it righteous.

Eve, they say, started it all,
but what choice did she have
in a garden full of silence?
Her bite was a hunger
for more than Eden’s cage—
it was her way to know herself.
In her shame, I see strength.
In her sin, I find salvation.
She did not fall,
she rose.

And then there’s Pandora,
blamed for every sorrow.
They never speak of the hope
she clutched in her trembling hands,
the last thing she saved
when all else was lost.
Even in chaos, she chose light.

We, the women of darkness,
the sisterhood of the misunderstood,
the ones they fear but never know,
We bear the weight of their myths,
yet we are so much more.

Medusa’s gaze wasn’t meant to harm,
but to hold the world accountable.
Lilith’s flight wasn’t defiance,
but the first act of courage.
Eve’s apple wasn’t betrayal,
but the taste of freedom.
Pandora’s box wasn’t her curse—
it was her power.

Call us monsters,
call us wicked,
but know we are heroes
in a story you’ve never learned to read.

You call us cursed,
but we are creators.
You name us temptresses,
yet it is you who are tempted.
We never sinned for you,
we simply sinned.

How do your sins make you human…
and our sins make us villains?
Can you taste the hypocrisy in your judgments?

We are not your scapegoats,
not your nightmares,
not your excuses.

We are the ones who stood,
broke the silence,
chose the fire over the chains.
We are the breath of storm winds,
the hands that tilt the scales.
Each of us, a force untold,
each of us, a reckoning.

We are Medusa,
we are Lilith,
we are Eve,
we are Pandora.
Our stories are not your warnings—
They are your reminders
that we were never yours to name.

*

The Matador’s Skin

My former stepfather is a bull of a man.
Filled with rage and misunderstanding —
He stomps, breaks, and smashes,
Never fulfilled by the carnage. Always craving more.

I tried to play matador.
I put on my bravest face and waved a red flag,
Trying to coax that bull away from my mother and siblings.
I purposefully wore a target,
Hoping my distraction and subterfuge
Might save the rest of my family some hurt.

Every bruise a declaration of war,
My skin now the only ground left to fight on.
Beneath the surface, the fault lines tremble,
Waiting for the next eruption, the next battle scar.
Blood pooled beneath the skin like silent rebellions,
Each one a promise that peace was never an option.

I am not the kind of woman
Who wants to hold hate in her heart.
I want to forgive, to grow, to love.
But I can’t love or forgive a bull of a man
Who treated my family like a china shop
He lived to destroy.

*

Heather Kays memoir/family saga, Pieces of Us, explores her mother Emma Mae’s struggles with alcoholism and addiction. Her upcoming YA novel, Lila’s Letters, follows a young woman finding strength and healing through unsent letters. Writing has been her passion since she was 7, and she also runs The Alchemists, an online writing group. Heather enjoys discussing storytelling, complex narratives, and the balance between creativity and marketing.