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a feeling has passed before a charted present

^{I wanted to write a book that was like lying down.
—Bhanu Kapil}

a feeling has passed before a charted present
a possibly expired desire
a replacement of Whitman’s body with his opposite
a polite vengeance

a presumed minor literature
a simile not in force
a yoking of the concrete
a myth makes

a body subject to forces not legislated to pass over a same
a memory uncertain about a sentence
a certain observation of an indefinite object
a response barely stands

a sentence only to signal an unwritten
a demand for a law barring its passage and end
a tapeworm, a pinworm, a hookworm, a threadworm
a fluke a sentence wants never to end

Kimberly Alidio, a poet, essayist, historian, and teacher, is the author of five poetry collections: Traceable Relation (Fonograf Editions, 2025); Teeter (Nightboat Books, 2023), winner of both the Nightboat Poetry Prize and the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry; why letter ellipses (selva oscura, 2020); : once teeth bones coral : (Belladonna*, 2020), a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award; and after projects the resound (Black Radish, 2016).

About Kimberly Alidio

Themes

About this Poem

“I’ve been thinking a lot about feminist art of the femme body, especially the body of a self-identified woman of color. Ana Mendieta and Laura Aguilar, for example. Bhanu Kapil’s writing and performance art bring a speaker’s body into text where the body at times lies down to mark important sites of struggle. Kapil’s sentence, ‘I wanted to write a book that was like lying down,’ is so evocatively strange in terms of verb tense and figurative language that it sparked my poem, first in the form of a prose poem. I revised it into a lineated litany or list because I wanted to write a poem that was like slowing down a sentence. I want the present tense to listen to its possible futures, and to ask, ‘What kind of power of undoing is wielded by being undone?’”
—Kimberly Alidio

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More by this poet

Two strangers

pass away & the summer stations. Of the indelible & the
tremulous, both a fellowship & an indictment. Slowing down to
idle, swaying in suspension, a momentum that can spiral to a
stop or start up. Forward for ten seconds & undo to get
somewhere. To mirror, to double evanescence. Of the
diptych, non-binary binary, the &/or, refusal to decide, multiple
in the dual, refusal of one & space of other. The swampy
bugginess of endless rain flips the scorch & wildfires of the

Kimberly Alidio

2023

From “The Sky Forever” [reenact reincarnate the earthquake]

reenact reincarnate the earthquake

on the long return to your bed

iamb tendril threading fretted fingers strummed purr crest into soft pang

landing buzz stomach pit’s nervy light radius

Kimberly Alidio

2019

From “The Sky Forever” [to say your land vanished]

to say your land vanished into thinness scrap under your feet

when the name feels the same in the mouth who is the most hysterical person

to say I was never meant to the origin moment do you remember laughing

be about poetry’s originating in childhood trauma when the first American boot

Kimberly Alidio

2019

Poems

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a feeling has passed before a charted present

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