King of neither plant nor animal
but of mornings after
rain / / ghost sprung in the gloaming
a memory of betweenness / /
arisen in the dark
and damp / / I touch your thick cap
with an alien finger / / rifle
the fan of gills beneath / /
I search for the animal
in you / / am only a passerby / /
uncertain whether my
touch is ruin / / how you
might linger in the ridged tips of my
hand / / I am certain I
should not linger / / could not bear
another morning’s collapse into
filament and mulch / / soft / /
still softer / / then much too soft.
This poem is from Pangyrus’s poetry collection, What Tells You Ripeness: Black Poets on Nature, Edited by Nikki Wallschlaeger (available in our store).
Image: “Young ferns” by Jakub T. Jankiewicz, licensed under CC 2.0.
Donika Kelly is the author of THE RENUNCIATIONS (Graywolf 2021) and BESTIARY (Graywolf). BESTIARY is the winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry, and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. The collection was also long listed for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for a Publishing Triangle Award and a Lambda Literary Award. A Cave Canem graduate fellow and member of the collective Poets at the End of the World, Donika has also received a Lannan Residency Fellowship, and a summer workshop fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic online, The Paris Review, and Foglifter. She currently lives in Iowa City and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches creative writing.
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