Submission
The bone goes dark
deep in the crook—I cannot
hold the quiet
longer, bear my side while
she insists. But
how entire she becomes,
how present
force beneath gentle skin.
I want
to read. A person
beyond what we agree.
I am not just this body. She is
not just her restraint.
I want to meet everything
there is for the first time
the accuracy of dying inside
I can celebrate that.
Leave the lights on even
feel my relief at
what I am called, at a self ruled
by something
besides an ever-present self.
Ice
At its hardest, water doesn’t move—
freedom of form for density of word.
The middle force of the core is all vowel.
If the question were would I choose
my love or hers, I’d go unanswered,
unconsoled, ice on a stove.
Rae Gouirand’s first collection of poetry, Open Winter, was selected by Elaine Equi for the 2011 Bellday Prize, won a 2012 Independent Publisher Book Award and the 2012 Eric Hoffer Book Award, and was a finalist for the Montaigne Medal, the Audre Lorde Award, and the California Book Award for poetry. Her poems and essays have appeared recently in American Poetry Review, VOLT, The Brooklyner, New South, PANK, Gertrude, Handsome, The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide, and two volumes of the Best New Poets series. The recipient of fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, the Santa Fe Art Institute, and Kalani, as well as an award from the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation, Gouirand has founded numerous community workshops in poetry and prose online and throughout California’s Central Valley. An adjunct lecturer in the Department of English at UC-Davis, she is currently at work on a collection of linked essays.
