Jessica Guzman Alderman

Return to the Tomato Dirt

the shadow / your tree
spreads over the skeletons
of old dogs / fish / beetles’
cracked carapaces boring
into my feet / the heat
transplant / the sweet smell
I crushed for the miracle
paste / spoonfuls / waiting
still I try on the name
you gave me / yellow flowers
listening in / between us
dirt sifts / no matter
how plenitude steadies
my grip / my fingers / ripe red

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Return to the Queue

bone I keep / bone I palm
into the ocean / bone brightens
coral / white as light / stripes
my hands / guilty with forgetting
your brown / I daydream
how / fully the body founders
and leavens / bone slides
against the waves / of aurora
swelling ossuaries / tip over
my shins / in the brackish
how quickly you cross / vistas
with marrow / the red and yellow
hissing / in your bones / reduced
to wavebreak / my ankle like a rock
licked / raw with hope




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Jessica Guzman Alderman’s work appears or is forthcoming in Pleiades, Ecotone, The Florida Review, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of American Literary Review’s 2017 Poetry Prize and Harpur Palate’s 2017 Milton Kessler Memorial Prize in Poetry. A doctoral student at the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers, she reads for Memorious.