Or I Want Brown & Black & Queer Joy To Be Ubiquitous: Or What We’re Made Of Connects Us, Fuck: Or I Am Writing This Poem When I Should Be Out Protesting So This Poem Is A Protest Instead

by Felicia Zamora

I wonder about vulnerability. Envisage. How my third metacarpal
smacks into wood & the purples surface skin long before tender
before my eyes package up the scene for nerve cells to detect
in a type of mystery only cells talking solves. I carve a love poem
to my body inside the skull, in hopes all eyes roll back far enough
to read my inscription in shitty penmanship. In maturation outside
the womb, to explain our thinking means a study of brain chemicals,
electric signals, neurons as neighbors—cityscapes under flesh. Our
thoughts propagate in neuron fire. Waves of waves of waves—signals
of us, compounds in coalesce. Peel us back to reveal a galaxy of burning
hydrogen & helium & churn of nuclear forges in our guts; heaven
held in the pin pricks of pin pricks. My body a constellation of elements
of stars gone supernova—transient & astronomical my atoms—stellar
fusion gives me assemblage in a last evolutionary stage before explosion.
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Felicia Zamora is the author of six books of poetry including, Quotient (Tinderbox Editions, April 2022), I Always Carry My Bones, winner of the 2020 Iowa Poetry Prize (University of Iowa Press, 2021), Body of Render, Benjamin Saltman Award winner (Red Hen Press, 2020), and Of Form & Gather, Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize winner (University of Notre Dame Press). A CantoMundo and Ragdale Foundation fellow, she won the 2020 C.P. Cavafy Prize from Poetry International, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, the Tomaž Šalamun Prize, and a 2022 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Georgia Review, Guernica, Missouri Review Poem-of-the-Week, Orion, Poetry Magazine, The Nation, West Branch, and others. She is an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Cincinnati and associate poetry editor for the Colorado Review.