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
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
-- Jessica Guzman Alderman’s work appears or is forthcoming in Pleiades, Ecotone, TheFlorida 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.