This selection, chosen by Guest Leslie Rzeznik, is from This Body I Have Tried to Write by Ja'net Danielo, released by Mayday in 2022.
text of poem
THE FIRST RESTRAINT WAS THE BODY, how it could never be horses or mist, its bone vocabulary— femur, clavicle, the turn away & revert back of vertebra—heavy in the mouth. Cabal of cells, speakeasies in the velvet red of blood. A secret door, secret knock, the secret password just out of earshot. How it stepped out, looking for some green field of anywhere else. How, not horses or mist, it returned again & again, pulled you to its blood & bone ache, held you close, just would not let go.
Ja’net Danielo is the author of This Body I Have Tried to Write, winner of the MAYDAY 2022 Poetry Micro Chapbook Editors’ Choice Award, and The Song of Our Disappearing (Paper Nautilus, 2021). A recipient of a Professional Artist Fellowship from the Arts Council for Long Beach and the Telluride Institute’s Fischer Prize, her poems have appeared in Frontier Poetry, Mid-American Review, GASHER, Radar Poetry, and elsewhere. Originally from Queens, NY, Ja’net teaches at Cerritos College and lives in Long Beach, CA, where she facilitates Word Women, a free virtual poetry workshop for cancer patients and survivors.
Leslie Rzeznik lives in southeast Michigan. She earned her BA in English and Creative Writing from the University of Michigan and won The Academy of American Poets prize in 2013. Her work has appeared in Alyss, Bone Bouquet, Sling Magazine, Willawaw Journal, and Bear River Review.
