What Black Thing Have I Seen at a Museum?

Mathangi Subramanian speaks to Donika Kelly about her new poetry collection, “The Natural Order of Things.”

By Mathangi SubramanianOctober 26, 2025

• Poetry

ALTHOUGH THIS IS her third collection, queer Black poet Donika Kelly never set out to write a book. Instead, the National Book Award nominee says, she focuses on one poem at a time.

“Setting out to write a book can limit the fullness of your artistic exploration—especially if you’re writing about a hard set of experience,” Kelly says.

Kelly sourced her stunning new collection, The Natural Order of Things (Graywolf Press, 2025), from poems she penned during a seven-year period when she got divorced, fell in love with award-winning memoirist Melissa Febos, wrote The Renunciations (2021), and remarried. Kelly’s latest book reflects the full spectrum of these experiences, drawing on natural imagery to plumb the emotional depths of everything from romantic love to ancestry to friendships to bones. Throughout, Kelly roots her nuanced, profound observations in a quiet, contagious joy.

Over the course of our video call, Kelly and I spoke about different types of love, the poetic potential of the ocean, and how natural history museums make people weird. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

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MATHANGI SUBRAMANIAN: This is such a wide-ranging collection. How did so many different themes end up in the same book?

DONIKA KELLY: Because I tend to work at the level of the poem, I’m almost never thinking about a book. And if I start to think about a book, I try to put that out of my mind because I really do like working at the level of the poem. A poem doesn’t have to be good. A book is a lot of pressure. This collection, then, is truly that: a collection of poems written across a period of time. What emerges is a record of how I reoriented my life away from romantic relationships and the expectations of given family.

Your new collection is called The Natural Order of Things. Why did you choose this title?

Of all the titles I considered, this felt the warmest, maybe because it was reaching toward a kind of balance that I hoped would be true. Now, I recognize it is true. I was reaching for where I would land in the process of figuring out ways to love my family safely, and also my deep love for Melissa, for art, for my friends, and, eventually, for myself. Looking at all these poems together, how they resonate with each other, encouraged me to claim that this was the natural order, the final point where I could experience a balance that felt good.

This book definitely holds a lot of good feelings, especially joy. What is interesting to you about joy?

Often, the hard feelings are the ones that are the loudest. They might seem like the easiest to write because they’re making a lot of noise, and they don’t go away. But in this collection, the love poems, especially the ones for my family’s language or my great-grandma and my grandpa, aren’t as loud. Because a lot of that love is just long-term and steady.

I noticed a lot of kinds of love in this book, including platonic love, familial and ancestral love, and romantic love. Can you tell me a little bit about why love was such a central theme?

I love writing love poems. It’s one of my favorite things to do. I have a lot of feelings for a lot of people. At some point, I asked myself, “Can I write love poems that focus on other kinds of love?” My friends were such an obvious source of inspiration there. They are really, really beautiful, lovely people, some of the best people I know, and they’re complex. Not a single one of them is easy. So, I asked myself, “Can I write into that?” It became a kind of challenge that didn’t feel sad.

Whenever people say there isn’t a lot of love in the world, that doesn’t seem correct to me at all. In the West, we do not live in a political environment that prioritizes care for other people, but we still often see communities caring for one another. If the state is not providing resources, then people in a community try to figure out ways to resource each other. As someone who grew up poor, I got to experience that in my family: so much of what made our lives possible—that made my future possible, the future that I’m now living in—was the help family and community gave us.

In the love poems for Melissa, I thought, “How do you write a love poem when you’ve been in a long-term relationship?” To me, that’s an interesting question: How do I use what I know about writing love poems in the moment of eros, which is a heightened feeling, to write a poem about what happens when that calms down? What’s possible in that deepening?

I noticed that many of the poems use the ocean as a metaphor for desire. What is your relationship to the ocean? Why do you think it came up so often?

I love the ocean. The ocean has always been important to me. I find it terrifying, but I love it. I have this notion that the ocean is an animal. I like being in the ocean, but when I’m in it, it’s so clear to me that the ocean is alive; it’s an animal in which other things live. Because why not? We’re on a planet; we’re floating in space. Anything is possible.

Being near the ocean helps scale me to myself. Whatever thing I think I can do, however much I think I’m responsible for, I get near the ocean, and I’m like, “Oh, I’m little. Never mind. Everything’s fine!”

The way I think about the ocean has made it into a touchstone. Those two things together—both this growing notion that the ocean is animal and how it’s so big that it helps me understand and feel relief about how small I am—inform how it recurs across my work.

So for example, in “After Scissoring for the First Time at Thirty-Three,” in that moment, the feeling is so big. It’s like a big animal feeling, and so I think, “Can I capture that? What’s the biggest animal that has animals inside of them?” It’s the ocean.

Speaking of ocean animals, your poem “We Came Here to Get Away from You” is about an encounter with a white woman at a natural history museum while viewing an orca skeleton. Out of nowhere, the woman brings up the death of Emmett Till. What was the story behind that encounter?

That poem came out of an experience that I had at the Port Townsend Marine Science Center in Port Townsend, Washington, on the Olympic Peninsula. People were like, “There’s a skeleton of a whale. You should go see it.” The orca had been beached, and they’d cleaned its bones, put it back together, articulated it. I thought, “Yeah, okay, I’ll go do that.”

I’ve been to a lot of natural history museums, and I’ve had the opportunity to talk with lots of people at natural history museums, which has been wonderful. Really wonderful. But I think something that can be challenging for the people I talk to is that they don’t quite understand why I’m there. I’ve had a lot of really strange experiences in science museums, natural history museums, any museum where there are specimens mounted on display. There are white people who are like, “Why is this Black person here?” It happens so often.

In this case, I met this white woman who was a volunteer, a docent maybe. I think she saw me and was like, “Let’s interact with each other; let’s connect.” And she must have thought, “What Black thing have I seen at a museum?” Because we were just talking about museums. And I was talking about the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, which is one of my favorites, and she was like, “Oh, yeah, the Smithsonian Museum—Emmett Till!” I was like, “Come on, man. I came here to look at this whale. I did not come here to talk about lynching.”

It has been my experience that, sometimes, white people are not thinking about what they are bringing to Black people when they bring up deeply traumatic historical events. They want to show what they’ve learned, but they don’t think about the emotional effect. I know a lot about lynching, and I don’t want to talk about it at the marine science center.

At the same time, I was there looking at a skeleton of an orca that had been beached. It was sick, which might have been the reason that it beached. Part of the reason that it was sick is that we poisoned the water. We poisoned the food chain all the way up. So, there’s a way that I’m complicit now as a tourist going to see the remains of something I am partially responsible for killing.

In that poem, it’s easy to focus on what the white woman is doing. But in addition to expressing my frustration with her, I wanted also to express the frustration with myself in going to see so many bones. There’s a whale skeleton in almost every natural history museum, and the reason, generally speaking, is because of the whaling industry. It’s extractive capitalism. I’m a part of that now. I’m part of a culture that says that’s an okay casualty. A culture that says it’s sad, and we should probably protect the waters, but what can we really do?

So many of the poems in this collection talked about bones. Why do you think they were a recurring theme?

I don’t like skeletons. I find bones very unsettling. How do they grow? How is it that you have a little bone, and then there’s a big bone? How does a bone get bigger or stay small? I’m a little bit obsessed.

As I said, I’ve spent a lot of time in natural history museums, where there are a ton of bones. One of the first poems I wrote in this collection was “The Bone Museum [I didn’t come for the bones],” which was about going to museums. When I wrote it, I was thinking specifically of the New Bedford Whaling Museum, which does a beautiful, horrible job of putting whaling into the context of the transatlantic slave trade and the genocide of Native Americans, because all of this was happening at the same time. That museum was influential in terms of how I’ve come to think about what it means to go to these spaces as a Black person who’s interested in whales.

I’m not really interested in whale skeletons, although there are a lot of them. Almost every natural history museum I’ve been to has a whale skeleton. There’s even a white whale skeleton at the University of Iowa. I remember I walked in, and I was like, “I feel weird.” And then I looked over my shoulder, and I was like, “You can’t just put a body up there!”

The final poem, “Suicide Watch: Spring,” is such a perfect ending. How did you decide to make this the book’s last page?

I wrote this poem in 2018 when I was living in Western New York and teaching at a small Catholic university. It was a good job, and I made some good friends, but it was a devastatingly lonely place. I think most people who live there, aside from the people who taught there, had settled into a space of endurance. They were enduring, but they weren’t flourishing.

I had been so low. Just so, so sad. My marriage had ended. I was writing the poems in The Renunciations and confronting a lot of difficult material more or less by myself. I felt really alone.

The title, “Suicide Watch: Spring,” felt like what I’ve been on for my whole life. I want to be able to talk about suicidal ideation and depression without feeling ashamed. It’s a feeling alongside all the other feelings. In a way, in this poem, I got to make space for that feeling alongside the relief of not hitting the raccoon or of smelling my old dog’s little stinky neck or of writing poems, which I just love to do.

I don’t remember writing the poem, but I do remember almost hitting that raccoon. I was driving so much at that time. Melissa and I were together, but we were long-distance. I was traveling for Bestiary, driving so much between that town and Buffalo. On that day, I was on some little windy, rural road, and I saw the raccoon, and I was like, “Ah! Oh … okay.” The relief of not having hit it was so big that when I was writing a poem about it, I ended up cobbling together all the things that felt hopeful to me. I thought, “Maybe I’m moving on to a new coping mechanism. Maybe if I’m able to articulate this kind of hopefulness, I’ll be able to follow it.” It’s not a happily-ever-after, but it felt like saying, “This is something that’s possible.” It was a way of fixing that hope in place.

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Donika Kelly is the author of The Natural Order of Things (2025), The Renunciations (2021), and Bestiary (2016). A recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, she is also a Cave Canem graduate fellow and Pushcart Prize winner. She teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa.