Aaron Coleman
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“the earth is a living thing”
                                                              ~ Miss Lucille Clifton

language is a living thing
little symbols words and syntax breathe
the dawn shape
of its body. as we
speak and read and listen and
write it it moves.
colorful
etymologies praise ancestors
accents   inflections--
conversions in conversation. utterance
plays essence
figures and frames its sprouting
possibilities    withers useless
branches     claims futures.

Cough
                                          
                                          This broken glass so bright in me
                                          I wheeze, I breathe, I bleed, look
                                          down at the sink colors and gleam

in the drain. Life together with death
gifts us miracles. Somehow, still
here. The apartment at night shook

                                          until we found one morning, still until
                                          I teetered with support beams, wood
                                          in sounds around us creaks gravity--

pressure clutters my skull, but
what hangs, what balances
sharp from the end of the plumb

                                          line held vertical and air enough
                                          in me, these feather lungs, this life, to
                                          ​make blood new, keep going.
--
Aaron Coleman is the author of Red Wilderness (Four Way Books, forthcoming 2025), Threat Come Close (Four Way Books, 2018) winner of the GLCA New Writers Award, and St. Trigger (Button, 2016), selected by Adrian Matejka for the Button Poetry Prize. He is the translator of Nicolás Guillén’s The Great Zoo [El gran zoo] forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press Phoenix Poet Series in 2024. Coleman has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Cave Canem, the Fulbright Program, and the American Literary Translators Association. His poems and essays have appeared in publications including Boston Review, Callaloo, The New York Times, Poetry Society of America, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series. Aaron is currently the Postdoctoral Fellow in Critical Translation Studies at the University of Michigan and will join the faculty as Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature in fall of 2024.

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