Julia Guez
the dark is very dark

on the night-side of things,
long is very long.

My heart is feathered

fire, smallest
flying flag,

wings are sad,

sad, singing
not at all slow.

My heart

closes
in on itself not

unlike a peony

whose own process of
becoming has been

set back until

the open-handed
flower is tight and green

like a fist, poor thing is

thrumming in this
invisible glass case

which is also a frame

where the most
contagious are taken

to be alone

there all together,
praying the same prayer—
from the book THE CERTAIN BODY/ Four Way Books
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This poem, written while I was very sick with SARS-CoV-2, would first appear in the anthology, "A Fire to Light Our Tongues: Texas Writers on Spirituality," edited by Elizabeth Joan Dell and Donna Walker-Nixon and published by TCU Press in 2020.

Julia Guez on "Still Life When All Our Symptoms Seem to Have Symptoms of Their Own"
Composite of headshots of the 2023 Whiting Awards 10 Emerging Writers
"2023 Whiting Awards Recognize 10 Emerging Writers"

"'Every year we look to the new Whiting Award winners, writing fearlessly at the edge of imagination, to reveal the pathways of our thought and our acts before we know them ourselves,' said Courtney Hodell, director of literary programs. 'The prize is meant to create a space of ease in which such transforming work can be made.'"

via NPR
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Cover image of Chris Dombrowski's book, Ragged Anthem
What Sparks Poetry:
Chris Dombrowski on "Just a little green, like the nights when the northern lights perform"

"From my seat alongside Rattlesnake Creek, I looked upstream toward the high-elevation wilderness snowfields that framed and fed the floodplain. The water at my feet had once resided there, and before that it existed as moisture trapped inside a cloud, and perhaps before that as fog, the slough’s breath, the valley’s exhalation, ad infinitum."
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