Aracelis Girmay writes poetry, fiction, & essays. Her book of poems, Teeth, was published by Curbstone Press & received this year’s GLCA New Writers Award. Her work has been published in Ploughshares, Callaloo, Indiana Review, Massachusetts Review, & Bellevue Literary Review, among other journals. A Cave Canem Fellow & Acentos board member, Girmay teaches young people in the ACTION Program & is this year’s visiting writer at Queens College’s MFA Program.

Purchase her book, Teeth, here.

A Blooming Tree

Spring is a young guy on his back,
underneath the green, ripe tree
whose small fires we wear
in our hair & on our dresses, the dogwoods
& magnolias, the guy
whose voice is changing
from snow to donkey splay, sprawled out
in his Avirex & doo-rag
in the park I am walking.

City boy,
you are stiff at first, laid out
flat as a yellow skirt
I dried once on the front lawn,
but then I see you jerk ecstatic, the familiar
funk-bound buck under the air.

& I know.

Spring is your dark tree
between your hands. God bless you
on your back, making flowers
without a woman or a man,
& only the sky to call your husband,

Praise Song for the Donkey

“It was not possible to identify which parts belonged to the donkey & the girls.”
—witness, Gaza, Palestine, 2009
for Lama & Haya & the donkey, killed by an Israeli missile in Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza

Praise the mohawk roof
of the donkey’s good & grey head, praise
its dangerous mane hollering out. Beneath
her soft & mournful grey, still beneath
the skull, where it is dusk, praise
the rooms of the donkey’s eye & brain,
its pulleys & clang, this sound
of hooves & the girls still saying words.
Praise the girls still saying words,
praise the girls, their hands, the hooves
of their hearts hoofing against their opened chests
opened on the open road plainly, praise
the plain day, praise the donkey in it, praise
the fat tongue’s memory of grass or hay,
the hundred nights of animal sleep
flung far from the bodies, the sturdy houses of bones, all over
the decimated road where every thing is flying, praise
the deep, dark machine of the donkey’s eye,
the girl’s eye, like a movie-house crumbling
in a field outside of town—,
praise the houses & rocks it held once, the sky
before & after the missile, praise the dark
& donkey soul crossing over, every one,
every hill & girl it ever saw, crossing over
in the red suitcase of its blood, into the earth,
praise the donkey earth, earth of girls,
earth of funerals & girls, praise the small,
black luggage of the donkey’s eye
in a field, flung far,
filling the ants & birds
with what
it saw.

Portrait of the Woman as a Skein

Tell me what, on earth,
would make you leave your hands
or want to; at the wash-sink?
in the lemon grove?
on the way home from standing, baffled,
in the grocery?

I have seen you walk into traffic like a bird
with something else on your mind
as though wearing a hat, or a medal from a war.

Sometimes you leave yourself all over.
Sometimes your mind & shoes,
they fall behind you.
Sometimes your body is a skein
unraveling.

Sometimes you carry your heart around like a jar of cats
in heat or crying, I don’t remember.

Sometimes, it is true,
you are a church of Catholic schoolgirls.
You knew the hymns once, but forget how they go
so you stand mouthing hotpotato hotpotato
in the pews.

So far, the men you love
—or is it you?—
drop jugs of honey in the public streets
on purpose or not on purpose. It is hard to say.

Sometimes your body, in winter, is a dress the snow erases.
Sometimes you are decimated.
Sometimes, still, you remember you are capable of building houses.

Sometimes, it is true, you are like Lake Sovetskaya.
Buried underneath an arctic ice sheet:

___________________________________
                                    (                       ).

You think this might be safer.
With everything & nothing ajar.
  
*

Private, mysterious Perhaps, Dear Friend,
landscape of potential bedazzlements gleaming
like ice-skate blades at the Mojave Desert Salvation Army.
You are suitable & unsuitable.
All the songs you know are from a different country.
The fruits in your father’s poems
do not grow here.

You have lost the turquoise jacket
with your name magic-markered inside.

Your face is cold.

Your hands are cold.

Sometimes you leave your hair at the bus station
& get on the bus.

Sometimes you leave your hair at the bus station
& get on the bus & as your face falls asleep against the window
you realize it is all your body now, everything between you
& the pieces you lost once, the towers & crows,
the city (you) gleaming
in long, glorious hyphen
beneath stars.

Sometimes you are a broken barn.
Sometimes you are the street & trees.
Sometimes a spool of purple string.

You are a colander, sometimes
losing things.

Sometimes what keeps you alive is a mystery.
                       
*

Last night, the dream of you standing
in the doorway like a foghorn
calling for your hands to come back
home, & from a great distance, them
running towards you, two
children or two dogs. What scared you then,
you also called it beautiful—
the way their breath flew out of them like clouds,
the way they reached the dark yard panting & stood
deciding between the body & the woods.