Aracelis Girmay was awarded a 2015 Whiting Writer’s Prize for her third collection of poetry, The Black Maria (BOA Editions, 2016). Girmay received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award for her second collection, Kingdom Animalia, which was published by BOA Editions in fall 2011. She is the author of Teeth, a collection of poems published by Curbstone Press in 2007. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Bellevue […]
When I get the call about my brother, I’m on a stopped train leaving town & the news packs into me like freight, though it’s him on the other end now, saying finefine— Forfeit my eyes, I want to turn away from the blood on the floor of his house & how it got […]
All day long, the birds go Phebus! Phebus! & the geese, if I didn’t know better, would sound like donkeys. & they do. & somewhere, a girl loves a boy with her dark hand, & we come upon them in the park where the walkway is so skinny that my dress-hem catches fire when we […]
I got news yesterday from a friend of mine that all people against the war should send a bag of rice to George Bush, & on the bag we should write, “If your enemies are hungry, feed them.” But to be perfectly clear, my enemies are not hungry. They are not standing in lines […]
It is June. At El TaContento near 17th, the cook slices clean through the belly of a watermelon, Sandía, día santo! & honey bees grown in glistening temples dance away from their sugary hives, ants, in lines, beetles, toward your red, (if you are east, they are going […]
Oh, hooves who never killed me even once, though there were chances, I remember you on this road through Pennsylvania — fog riding the hills like steam off a horse’s neck, your neck, I flew hard over into the (dusty) sequined air like a rag doll ballet of tendons, acrobat shuffled up by your neck’s […]
your big, bad brain is a certain glory, mister samuel dictionary, how eloquence & etiquette charge your pages wearing predicate, seems to me, though, you’re wolfing the yard, in your ghost-gauze suit & your bones’ rattle, rattle, sir, scuse me, sir, i found the ax under the bed of your syntax […]
It rained all night. It did not rain. I strapped my life to a buoy & sent it out. & was hoping for a city as beautiful as hair or the saffron ghost of a monk in the morning. This morning I sneak out of your bed, & am the red […]