This Animal

Aracelis Girmay

Nearly done. Hunched againstthe curb’s low wall. Poisoned,pained into frantic stillness.By what do I feel she is a woman ratHer stoic, outcast labor.Her injury among the trash and cups and carts.Like any of us, maybe she was cared forin the beginning of her lifeand then was left, will not recoverthe ones to whom she belonged.Not last, not less.Just sad, lone, ash.Just that where are her people.Somehow my mind is with her—scattered, stray—the small tongue of this animalwhose world this was

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Yekaterina Gyadu

aracelis girmay is is a poet, editor, and teacher. Her work can be found in Astra, e-flux, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Yale Review, among other venues. girmay’s new book of poems, GREEN OF ALL HEADS, was published this fall.

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Green of All Heads
BOA Editions

Rochester, New York

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Written over the span of a decade, GREEN OF ALL HEADS is a work of formal range and emotional urgency. In the coinciding wakes of tragic loss and new motherhood, Aracelis Girmay examines the entangled temporalities of an aging parent and newly born children. This vital work grapples with what it means to attend to life in the context of corporate industries of birth and death. In language shaped by these pressures, she turns to what is small, unruly, nationless, plural – flowers, speech – to reach toward new relational and political possibility. Away from the fixed and monumental, and toward that which is fleeting, she writes: “-- i am learning to lift -- my voice -- like a flower -- in -- a field of flowers --” The result is a language broken and emboldened by love.

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