Camonghne Felix

When she was small I couldn't see
her I held her hand in tendered

obligation fed her because
she was hungry

slapped her because
she spoke one day she stole

my underwear
I climbed to the top of

our bunk beds my waist a cradle over her's
my fists a marsh of dead moons

shadowing her little face
after two taps I felt the

monstrosity of my putrid desires
flatten

my intrinsic knowings
suddenly afraid to bruise the small

genius
the strange foreign god of sisterhood

it was then I knew
I loved her something bad

she's off to college going to study
some aerospace biomedical nanoscience

shit some shit only white people think
to study because access is a frame

of reference an organizing principle
in the family group chat she sweats us out

with her excitement about next semester
and 8 a.m. trig


in high school I failed everything
graduated with underwhelming decimals

the dark trauma of men lining my transcript
but baby girl has got something

I don't
it's called discipline and

it moves her through the world slow
and deliberate all the night a platform

all the trains just stations away
she's off to space camp in a few weeks

and so fucking casual about it I say, hey
maybe you should be an astronaut yea, thinking

about it as if it were a breakfast burrito or
mommy's oxtail

my girl my young knight
driving a needle through the inflated

boundaries of ambiguous sciences I think
shiiiiiiit imagine?? My sister an astronaut???

lineage narrated through the brat
of my heart into

the prodigious stuff of the stars
towering in bigness

bigger than you and you and you
and you and you.

from the book BUILD YOURSELF A BOAT / Haymarket Books
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Many thanks indeed to all our readers and contributors, whose passion for poetry inspires us, and to all our generous donors, without whose support we could not continue. We look forward to sharing the very best contemporary poetry with you for the rest of the year. Stay safe and stay well.
Peter Gordon and Alison King in the earlier years of their marriage
"A Love in Verse"

"Thirty years ago, 'just for a laugh,' actor Peter Gordon wrote a poem for his wife Alison, and left it under her pillow. She liked it, and so he carried on, every day for 25 years. To this day, Gordon continues to add to the thousands of poems he had written for Alison, even after her death four years ago."
 
via THE GUARDIAN
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What Sparks Poetry:
Ana Božičević on Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”


"I can’t underestimate how much this kind of spelled repetition, the shifting meter and rhyme patterns following their own emotional logic and the music inside the words, influenced the way I write in English—Rossetti’s 'irregular measures' that John Ruskin amusingly declared a 'calamity of modern poetry.' But they also found a kindred bell in the ear as I simultaneously read the anonymous Croatian poets of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, poems of chant and repetition, epic simile and Slavic antithesis."
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