‘Case-Law Chests’
Kelsey Nichols Kelsey is a freelance artist and designer working across digital and print mediums for over five years outside Chicago. With a foundation in Interior Design, her creative practice blends structural sensitivity with expressive, intuitive mark‑making. She has exhibited work in multiple gallery showings and has been featured in a variety of international publications. Kelsey’s multidisciplinary approach spans abstract painting, skateboard art, photography, and digital oil painting. Her work often merges Impressionist sensibilities with modern digital techniques, creating pieces inspired by nature and everyday life through soft palettes, layered textures, and symbolic storytelling that invite viewers into quiet emotional landscapes.
Case-Law Chests
Faces go on filed not seen: threat-flagged, or, better for you, feeder-marked by a filched crust,
computerized against your crown. Since COVID, corvids have cached four thousand shiny points
- chrome-glinted and church-glared - along this corridor, the McPhillips underpass and the
ultraviolet dumpster, useless-to-you, urgent-to-me.
Humans are depleted of words for remembrance and so we are grudging beasts. Yet every office
has a filing cabinet, a repository of vital statistics. And that is close to my sons, who see ID cards
in jackets, and meal tickets in tattoos. That is a fledgling tie, untaught, at forty feet, an
inheritance of precedence.
Eleven hundred case-law chests of treasure, none written down, each is mapped in unsentimental
landmarking, for a hunger not yet hungry.
You strung wires for your own kilowatt reasons, tangled up and landmined across a yard. And I
have logged every dangling bulb in wing movements to the Perimeter, used every light to look
out for loot.
I have recognized my own face in the mirror, surely I will always know yours, divided as we are
by tongues. Yet I know grudges and coordinates and docking shine as demerits. I wake
mid-count, tallying our unpeopled secrets, where, and from whom, and whether it’s still owed by
you.
Author’s Note: ‘My poem sits entirely within the perceptual world of a singular magpie, confining itself to the bird's facial recognition, spatial memory and cache-mapping.’
Magnus Briar is a poet based in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Their debut collection, Prairie Chicken - a self-published love letter to their home province - appeared on several Amazon poetry bestseller lists shortly after its release. They have performed original poetry at festivals across Manitoba.
