Witness Magazine

O for passage

By
Poetry•Vol. XXIX No. 3 (Winter 2016)
To know seasons by shadows, hawk breath, the dip of day early & not early; a page exists for each of these; this too; as in sky, it’s all happening at once & you wonder how to hold a drop of rain outside the wet; all these puzzles with no solutions & nothing to
puzzle in to or out from; you remember your cells
belonging to others, before the dark grew you
of flesh in weave, of veins in form; to incubate; to taste world in liquid first; to know sky as your creator’s belly; feel the continuous hug of organs in soak; a haunt before womb; these months too a season; a swarm of molecules & atoms in bind; & in float, a spark;
& an O for passage; mouth in gape before the tongue learns—
Felicia Zamora
Felicia Zamora is the author of the book Of Form & Gather, winner of the 2016 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize from University of Notre Dame Press (2017). She won the 2015 Tomaž Šalamun Prize from Verse, and authored the chapbooks Imbibe {et alia} here (Dancing Girl Press 2016) and Moby-Dick Made Me Do It (2010). Her published works may be found or forthcoming in Columbia Poetry Review, Crazyhorse, Hotel Amerika, Indiana Review, Meridian, North American Review, Phoebe, Pleiades, Poetry Daily, Poetry Northwest, Puerto del Sol, Tarpaulin Sky Magazine, The Adirondack Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Michigan Quarterly, The Normal School, TriQuarterly Review, Verse Daily, Witness Magazine, West Branch, and others. She is an associate poetry editor for the Colorado Review and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Colorado State University.