Ghazal Containing My Estranged Mexican Tongue

Abstract

Ghazal Containing My Estranged Mexican Tongue Felicia Zamora (bio) Your incisors tear flesh of the bottom lip. Tastebuds flood with iron. Jaw: a boneunhinges from socket by fists by fists [this isn't supposed to have an arc]; jar of ribs shakes between palms, a cocktail for the devil hides behind the vowels, round mandiblein gape to expose the blackhole of throat where conocimiento dwells in open maxilla yet remains silent [your fucking up foundations again] [whose foundations] in hyoidyou consider all anatomical parts rupture when pressurized; a knee breaks a sternum crushes a nation's aortic everything [we in here, breathing after erasure]; universe in skullsynapsing across voids [lick the elbow, lick the nipple, lick the clitoris—never separate: sphenoid; frontal; zygomatic; ethmoid; scaffolds of orbicular] orbit us, see in collection. Song in sacrumin swivel to rhythms of naciemiento of wet & wondering cells circulating a spine threads muscles, veins, tissues [a body a rhetorical argument form cannot unweave], costillas—steps in a mausoleum of flesh [broken language climbs], in chest, Felicia, breaking wings from scapulas. [End Page 20] Felicia Zamora Felicia Zamora's books include I Always Carry My Bones, 2020 Iowa Poetry Prize winner (2021), Quotient (forthcoming 2022), Body of Render, Benjamin Saltman Award winner (2020), and Of Form & Gather, Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize Winner. A CantoMundo and Ragdale Foundation fellow, she won the 2020 C.P. Cavafy Prize from Poetry International, the Wabash Prize for Poetry and the Tomaž Šalamun Prize. Her poems appear in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Guernica, Orion, POETRY, The Nation, and others. She is an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Cincinnati and associate poetry editor for the Colorado Review. Copyright © 2022-2023 Pleiades and Pleiades Press