At the end of a lifetime,
                        I was a door
that opened only from the inside.

I was a pronoun that danced on the table
as the breath rushed out the room,
        was a flash of hair, pixels streaking.

The dance floor was studded with wishes,
chests fluttering
            with squares of August sky.
Everywhere doors opened and closed
inside us, pockets
of country dark I could not see.

So I hung the evening
by a rope. Loaded the gun
with silence.

It was the end of a lifetime, until
you struck
one end like a match.

And the burning piano released its music.

And the music was a pain we could walk through.

Blue nights across black floors,
we the people
swept towards each other
              like two hands of a clock.

Love
is a checkerboard of light.
Where my heartbeat goes, it
sprints the length of checkered farmlands,
wrapped in the disco
          of some stranger's arms.

Inside people            after dark,
these steps
go all the way down,
the kind of ending that goes on forever,
                the kind of forever that dies outside the body.

Loveliness
is a measure of time,
and strangeness,
a sail you can breathe into.
The birds in my skies tell me
they want to be free,
and the pair of lovers in the doorway
happens all the time:

A person walks through a door
in another person's darkness
from the journal MID-AMERICAN REVIEW
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A collage of sketched headshots of ten 2019 debut poets
Ten Debut Poets Reflect on Writing

"Many of the poets described accepting the time it takes for poems to arrive and learning that making poetry doesn’t always entail sitting at the desk, pen in hand. 'If I am looking at the world through poetic lenses and thinking of all of my work through the lens poetry has gifted me, then the poems are being written and will touch the page when it is time,' says Camonghne Felix." 

via POETS AND WRITERS
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Cover of The Essential Emily Dickinson, selected and with an introduction by Joyce Carol Oates
What Sparks Poetry:
Tanya Larkin on Emily Dickinson’s [I started Early—Took my Dog—]

“When I was in high school, I wrote out Emily Dickinson’s '[I started Early—Took my Dog—]' in outsize Goth-y script and taped it to my wall—understanding little of it. I had come across it while doing the dreaded twenty-page research paper for US History, the hallmark assignment of many a college prep school. My teacher was kind. He allowed me to take a patently literary topic and wrench it into a historical one, which is how I found myself leafing through Dickinson’s Collected looking for vaguely feminist poems. This one must have stood out in its forceful expression of utter female power."
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