Escaping a Suburban Prison in Kaie Kellough’s “Magnetic Equator”
Kaie Kellough's Magnetic Equator, a collection of disjointed yet interconnected poems, paints a vivid picture of the mind- with recurring, invasive thoughts, strong imagery, and specificities logged by the individuality of a brain that keeps the readers coming back for more. The poem that I kept coming back to was "high school fever", a grotesquely beautiful manifestation of the dysphoria one feels when trapped in a suburban nightmare. Poets are naturally inclined to romanticize and beautify experiences in an effort to resonate with the reader and grab their attention, yet Kaie Kellough's crude, ugly depictions of men "humping the fever// for high school forever..." latched their greasy claws into something I thought only I understood- the discomfort and alienation that the toxic environment of suburban high schools create.
Kellough embodies the speed at which small town teenagers sprint towards adulthood, yet remain seventeen forever, a terrifying, rotting fate that motivated me to run all the way to another country for university. The existence of adulthood and adolescence simultaneously forever creates a numbing toxicity; "everybody/ is unconscious, is leaking cheap beer, is stinking/ is down by the elbow river drinking... / kissing with cigarette breath, accelerating/ legal limit and centrifugal force, steel and glass hurtling/ toward yes, boot in the broken grass, the bloody print/ tracked to this nowhere, this prairie, this periphery, this intoxicated/ accident...". Kellough describes perfectly how this hurtling towards freedom from a small-town prison of "leaking cheap beer" and "kissing with cigarette breath" often just throws one right back into "periphery” or feeling like they are on the outside. Naturally, humans crawl back to what they know, and thus, the townies, the "peaked-in-high-schoolers", and those who simply cannot escape are borne forever back into the suburbs.
Something Kaie touched on that was especially reminiscent of my experience living in small-town America was intertwining the white world of evangelical Christianity with his sweaty, beer-soaked descriptions of the very same town; "i shivered in the evangelical rupture of the suburbs./ the good samaritan shouted down his wife. his sermon boomed outside his/ home, shattered windows, burst door hinges." The diction of "sermon" to describe the domestic abuse often ripe in the evangelical Christian religion shows how this abuse is often masked using the Bible, and how violence is justified through "the word of God".
He later splices this image with the "stinking" imagery of before; "some evangelical couple's freckled son// will confess a gay fantasy to a guidance counselor/ whose corduroy suit stinks of smoke, old coffee, and rum, then/ will hang himself in his parents' home after her plummets/ from an ejaculation in the locker room." This passage shows that no matter your background, the toxic environment of "nowhere, prairie" exists within each person, and forcibly rejects both change and difference, expelling those who wish to change or be change into eviction (like myself), into death, or into the third choice, compliance. Although I feel there is a magnitude more to discuss in relation to this poem, "high school fever" truly reminded me of where I came from and although it is heavy and unpleasant to read at some instances, it felt the closest to the truth I have felt from a poem in the longest time.
Photo Credit: Kevin Calixte
