Our next tattooed poet is Kayleb Rae Candrili, who shared this tattoo:
Kayleb's tattoo was inked by Timmy Tatts (@timmytattsoriginal) at King Cobra Tattoo (@king.cobra.tattoo) in State College, PA, 2014. The tattoo makes an appearance in the following poem, "Some Thoughts on Luck," which was first published with Peach Magazine, January 22nd, 2019:
SOME THOUGHTS ON LUCK
:::
superstitious sicilians in the mountains,
all we spoke about
was mickey mantle and my father’s
old mafia ties.
can you imagine
the rabbit’s feet hung
round my neck during hunting
season, the fur
matted and the nails
so desperate
to finally decompose.
what does it mean
to carry a dead
animal so closely to your heart
in hopes you might
kill some more.
:::
:::
when i learned to swallow
i began to drink
the ocean. so much booze
it might as well
have been sea salt. drunk and in
a bad love, stevie nicks
was my only god.
and what is god
besides a superstition,
a belief
in that which
will never be proven.
my inner thigh is tattooed with an effigy
of a rock star—so holy,
but still proving
the way liquor can take
hold of even your skin,
make it
something you’ve never seen before
and will see every day after.
:::
:::
my father has always hated
women, though
he has always needed them.
what a rich history,
this narrative of misogyny.
counting fist-falls
as sheep
is a storied simile.
finally, i am no longer drunk
or superstitious.
and though i am marked
by having been so,
i can feel love
now, like my father
never has.
i am thankful to have been born
his daughter
because if i had been born my father’s son,
forget about it.
:::
Kayleb Rae Candrilli is a 2019 Whiting Award Winner in Poetry and the author of What Runs Over with YesYes Books, which was a 2017 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in transgender poetry. Their second collection, All the Gay Saints, won the 2018 Saturnalia Book Contest and is forthcoming in Spring 2020. Candrilli is published or forthcoming in POETRY, TriQuarterly Review, Academy of American Poets, Boston Review and many others. You can read more here.
Thanks to Kayleb for sharing their cool tattoo and poem with us here on Tattoosday's Tattooed Poets Project!
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