Ghazal for a First Lover
When I first took her or she took me, sanded
and bagged me, loosened up my eyes
Sun was our planet, broken into arrows, heat along
our arms, burned, burnt, dissolving into ay’s
Mouthed weather, marsh of sheets, splintered skin
where now she buried salt, my gorgeous demise
I tried not to name what came for me, yet: elbow, kneecap,
chin hair, waves of smell grafted to cupping hands, overflowing eyes
Grew me longer than the length of me, myself gone reaching,
reaping—how, silly me, I thought I’d ever used before my eyes.
From Might Kindred (University of Nebraska Press, 2022). Copyright © 2022 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher.
Mónica Gomery
Mónica Gomery is the author of Might Kindred (University of Nebraska Press, 2022), winner of the 2021 Prairie Schooner Raz-Shumaker Book Prize; Here is the Night and the Night on the Road (Cooper Dillon Books, 2018); and the chapbook Of Darkness and Tumbling (YesYes Books, 2017).
Gomery serves as a rabbi at Kol Tzedek synagogue and on the faculty of SVARA: a Traditionally Radical Yeshiva. She is also a cofounder of Let My People Sing!