Water up to her thighs; her living room, say
outpour, say stream where no stream should be & Louisiana swims inside its own belly again; how stories echo of other stories; the past weaves us & the condition, say present, sits on our chests & our convulsive efforts to utter comfort little, if such notion exists; how her brow furrows to match the ripples in her gait. |
Antennae, then thorax; costal margin of; now
say moth; how you form with mind & mouth & moth, here, at your nose before all synapses synapse; to recall moment & be in mystery again with late comprehension; you caught in wingspan flutters, in night’s compression; how real touch & not; your skin open & porous; how element undoes; please, again, please. |
What we don’t say; omissions; the wide-wide stretches
out in front of you & you afraid to say white; how we measure percentage; say blood; & know something in wound; your face in distort; reflection of reflection; & your mother in sobs on the curb; the edifice of a brick building with the food bank in its belly; curse you for sharing; bi-racial: a badge; how no one cares for badges in these parts; what white requires of the brown; little brown everything, yet not; you in revel of race again; do not speak of race: all the things you were told to hide you from you; you, languages apart; say native tongue, say your tongue twisted before birth; say anything over & over to mean nothing of experience in a school yard with knuckles on flesh not your own & the split of a lip in slow bleed. |
photo credit:
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Felicia Zamora is the author of the books Of Form & Gather, winner of the 2016 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize from University of Notre Dame Press (2017) and & in Open, Marvel (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press 2017). She won the 2015 Tomaž Šalamun Prize from Verse, and authored the chapbooks Imbibe {et alia} here (Dancing Girl Press 2016) and Moby-Dick Made Me Do It (2010). Her published works may be found or forthcoming in Columbia Poetry Review, Crazyhorse, Hotel Amerika, Indiana Review, Meridian, Notre Dame Review, North American Review, OmniVerse, Phoebe, Pleiades, Poetry Daily, Poetry Northwest, Puerto del Sol, Raleigh Review, Tarpaulin Sky Magazine, The Adirondack Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Michigan Quarterly, The New Guard, The Normal School, TriQuarterly Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Verse Daily, Witness Magazine, West Branch, and others. She is an associate poetry editor for the Colorado Review and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Colorado State University. She lives in Colorado with her partner, Chris, and their three dogs, Howser, Lorca, and Sherlock.
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