Poems

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Ocean Water

The ocean pushes back
Alive and vigorous
The heritage of habitat
Leans against expectation
Muscles its due respect
Without regard
Without warning
Without reorienting the ones
With swimming pool perspectives
Limitations of consistent temperatures
and painted cement walls

The ocean rumbles its sovereignty
Full weight of freedom on my
skin

Dasha Kelly Hamilton is a writer and performance artist. She is a national Rubinger Fellow and, concurrently, Poet Laureate for the City of Milwaukee and the State of Wisconsin. In 2021, she received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship.

About Dasha Kelly Hamilton

Themes

Oceans

Self

Turmoil

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More by this poet

The Laureate Fellows’ Collaborative Poem

^{A cross-country, exquisite corpse by thirteen regional poet laureate fellows from our 2021-2022 cohort examining the role of a laureate in community.}

Always a shift in definitions:
auteur author into community worker,
not we are here to hear your voice
but are here to give us voice
(we seem to have mislaid it on the way
to society, did you bring a flashlight?)
Call it impropriety — we aim to misbehave.
To remind you all your money is no remedy
for the grave.

Brian Sonia-Wallace

Andrea “Vocab” Sanderson

Semaj Brown

Luisa A. Igloria

Georgina Marie Guardado

Lloyd Schwartz

Aileen Cassinetto

Marcus Amaker

Magdalena Gómez

Bobby LeFebre

Melissa Kwasny

Dasha Kelly Hamilton

Chasity Gunn

2022

Hope is a Bruise

Paintball pellets batter shoulders
and thighs at 190 miles per hour
I count the purplish bruises and
smile at the post vision of us toasting
laughing, being vibrantly alive

Dasha Kelly Hamilton

2021

Bitter Winter

Forgiveness hangs flimsy between you
and the raw truth you've come to know:
Resentments do come home to roost, to peck, to force you
into navigating fatherhood from your knees. There are
explosives undetonated on your tongue, tasting
like guilt, goddamn and gunpowder all swirled together
You teach yourself to swallow, to repent, to deny the
flames licking from your chest. Arms crossed, she bids you a bitter winter.

Dasha Kelly Hamilton

2017

Poems

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Ocean Water

More by this poet

The Laureate Fellows’ Collaborative Poem

Hope is a Bruise

Bitter Winter

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