Witness Magazine

Peel-back

By
Poetry•Vol. XXIX No. 3 (Winter 2016)
How land lays over itself, sediment-full; we all in the belly of something other; you witness the neighbor’s dog in taunt of blue day; this just out of & reach is a noun no longer in roll off your tongue; how arms-length means at bay at bay; what you try to keep
out despises & the reflection of your bones in the mirror
means exposure; & you feel so orange in the peel-back
rinds of elbows, of knee caps; & wounds & their wide-wide-open, if able, any locked door…& arches & more knobs; neighbor’s pit bull; foam in the mouth; when you compact it all down: a mountain; who counts in landscapes? You ask a question & the question stares back, blank, in dare to answer.
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.