Poems

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

Kimberly Alidio

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

compass me

snaking infinite under ink

kin planar prisms of eyelids

bloomed lip landscape plaid

under brim look at me ancestral

hollows invaded millennia

dwell binding curtains closed eyes

now intimate idioms

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

Body

Desire

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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

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

Kimberly Alidio

2021

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

More by this poet

Two strangers

a feeling has passed before a charted present

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

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