Kelly Kanayama grew up in Hawaii and, after a series of stops in Missouri, Oxford, rural Wales and Cardiff, has settled in Norwich.
She studied English Literature at Washington University in St. Louis and at Oxford University, and obtained an MA with Distinction in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia in 2008.
Currently she works as a freelance editor, writer and English tutor.
She has been published in The Eliot Review, Apex, the Gatehouse Press anthology Spring, and the Gists and Piths Poetry Blog, and in 2009 was shortlisted for the Norfolk Commission.That honeycomb in a lion’s
yawning belly, he knew, was God
writ sweet—never mind the fur
spiked with blood, the flies
sticky in it. Four bee-stings
and three years later he’s licking
honey from Delilah’s stomach,
then he’s de-locked, daggers
deep in both eyes, no meat
left on the arms lifting now.
You could have warned me,
he says. Still and small: I did,
said God. Remember the lion?
Brushing aside sheets of dust exposes latticed femur
and tibia pressed to the earth, phalanges
hooked in the other’s ribs.
They lie for centuries like this: trace vanished black
waves of hair, rattle fingers
over each new skull-crack. Like this, the grave-perfume rising
all night from hollow breasts. Stripping off
their skin before morning.
© 2009
Salt Publishing Limited