Selected Publications
Glens Fall//s and Frost Heave
Published in Jet Fuel Review, Fall 2025
Is this how this country is going to answer you
and your immodest demands for a different world…?
-Elizabeth Bishop, “Arrival at Santos”
​
Here, our money makers shake
with smog
and pulp and flecks of god
knows what...
​
Narcissus Reconsiders
Published in The Swannanoa Review, Winter 2025
I always imagined they’d take me
farther away: dismay and desire. Or
that the river—that great withholder,
older than my father’s father’s
echo—would keep what remains
of my dreams, might still gleam...
​
Parting Words
Published in RHINO 2024
See you later,
collimator. After a while,
sundial.
​
See you later,
navigator. After a while,
safety isle.
​
​
Ars Poetica
Published in The Cortland Review, Issue 93
In my father’s final days
he says he gets lost
in thinking periods,
that he can share them
whenever I need
a good lecture. He
cackles as he says this...
​
The Purchase
Published in The Hopkins Review, Winter 2023
Late August, in the shade of a canvas
tarp, near the blue brick of Bolton Dance
Academy and the newly warped
traffic circle spilling toward the Hudson...
In the Palace of Forgetting
A poem-interview with Keith Leonard, published in American Poetry Review, January/February 2023
What shape is the window of longing?
​
The window of longing is circular, in general. But it’s also an Apollonian Gasket, comprised of many smaller circles within it. Each circle recalls all other circles, just as each longing recalls all other longings.
Giant Looks Giant in the Mirror
In Narrative, Poem of the Week 2021
I was an infant until they handed me my brother
for a rattle. I was a baby until I suddenly shot up to six
feet tall. I was a toddler then, learning how to fall...
Two Poems
In The Los Angeles Review
New Normal, Illinois
We are driving to an orchard! The blue dawn throws
a glaze on the trees! Windfall falls! Coins from last night’s rain
light up the grass! The past and present
fuse in a single ride!
About Matthew Kelsey
Originally from Glens Falls, New York, Matthew Kelsey is a poet and actor based in Chicago. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. He has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a teaching fellowship from the Kenyon Review Young Writers Program, and an Idyllwild Arts Writers Week Fellowship.
Matthew has appeared in improv and sketch comedy shows at Second City (Chicago) and the Hugo House (Seattle). He is a member of Mega Pancake and is in Second City's musical improv conservatory.