• Aching

    Stefania Gomez

    Summer 2023

    and amber rivulets of water running to the bay,
       bass boat, beached, cormorant
          clamming at the first silver light, and compromise,

    a dark dolphin leaping
       against the day, and do-si-do,
          eating the echinacea,

    the full brazen moon baring
       itself above the seafood boil, and guts,
          the horseshoe crab, upturned, swarmed

    by an ecstasy of ants, the itch,
       the stunted junipers, whose roots,
          here, grow tangled,

    and kelp sullying white sand,
       lava that eons ago formed the boulders
          the surf now washes over, and the men,

    Stefania Gomez is a queer writer and teacher from Chicago’s South Side who received her MFA in poetry at Washington University in St. Louis. Currently teaching at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago, she has received fellowships from the Dirt Palace, Sewanee Writers Conference, Lambda Literary, and the International Quilt Museum and is a 2023 Fulbright Research Award Grantee. Her manuscript, Redwork, is a finalist for the 2022 The Journal/ Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize.

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