Stacking Cistern My Bones on Top of Your Bones on Top of Your Bones

Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Not an optimist. I lie awake at night and say the nameof everyone on the block and for three blocks overand then the names of the people I don’t know. I callthem by their house number, by their street address.I wish they not be sick. I wish they not get shot. I wish.It calms me but also is it selfish? Do I do it to keepmyself alive? I have a theory that if I let the lightout into the world then we’ll all get to stay alive. Wantto stay alive. I think of everything I know about allthe people on my block. I list Ms. Edna and her children.I say the names of everyone at the church and thenthe people I don’t know. I want everyone to have money.I want everyone to have a house and food and bebelieved in and be told they’re believed in. I wantto know these things can happen so I don’t want to die.Or so I can feel the hollow part of me filling with allof us getting to be filled up. There’s no part of me that’sa saint. I’m not saying this to get some extra credit.I’m saying I wonder if you do it too? My bones on topof your bones on top of your bones. Or your boneson top of mine. All of us awake at 3 a.m. wishing the bestfor people like filling up an endless cistern with lightand understanding. All the way down to the center ofthe earth and up to where the solitary planes fly past.

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Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of The Last Time I Saw Amelia EarhartApocalyptic Swing (a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize), and Rocket Fantastic, winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. Calvocoressi is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including a Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship from Stanford University; a Rona Jaffe Woman Writer’s Award; a Lannan Foundation residency in  Marfa, TX; the Bernard F. Conners Prize from The Paris Review; and a residency from the Civitella di Ranieri Foundation, among others. Calvocoressi’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in numerous magazines and journals including The Baffler, The New York TimesPOETRYBoston ReviewKenyon ReviewTin House, and The New Yorker. Calvocoressi is an Editor at Large at Los Angeles Review of Books, and Poetry Editor at Southern Cultures. Works in progress include a non-fiction book entitled, The Year I Didn’t Kill Myself and a novel, The Alderman of the Graveyard. Calvocoressi was the Beatrice Shepherd Blane Fellow at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute for 2022 – 2023. Calvocoressi teaches at UNC Chapel Hill and lives in Old East Durham, NC, where joy, compassion, and social justice are at the center of their personal and poetic practice. Their new collection of poetry, The New Economy, is a finalist for the 2025 National Book Award in Poetry.

The New Economy
Copper Canyon Press

**2025 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD Finalist**

A devotional to the ungendered vessel as it ages, dreams, and survives. A practice of radical collaboration, failure, and renewal. A world of “Miss You” poems opening a portal to all those we’ve lost and would love to visit for a while. In Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s latest collection, The New Economy, poems are haunted by the ghosts of loved ones and childhood memories, by changing landscapes and bodies. Calvocoressi’s own figure is examined—investigating the desire to protect the body one is born with and the longing to have been born in another. Cisterns sing with the musicality of a poet who understands both the power of sound and silence—those quiet spaces inviting us to consider the words we cannot hear. “The days I don’t kill myself are extraordinary” one poems says. “Why don’t we have a name for it?” Lyrical and unafraid, The New Economy invites us to name our fears and sorrows, to write to who or what has left us, to create practices that can hold both the darkness and light of this (in)finite life.

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