Rachelle Toarmino
if I am speaking to you
and I suddenly stop

it is because I am considering
that everything I say lately feels like a draft

there are fresh coats of paint
and a world in my mouth!

adhesive doubts
live in the hairs on my tongue!

behind my teeth
is where I leave my dreams!

I am speaking this
like the little boy I babysit

who points to the space underneath his knees
and says I usually like to cry in here

I am trying to tell you
that I don't know if I come across

whether or not you hear something
if you don't have a word for it

I am a gesture
I belong mostly to movement
from the book THAT EX / Big Lucks Books
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“A WORD FOR IT” is the second poem in the (unofficial) second half of "That Ex." It acts as a bridge between the themes of the first half—heartache, resentment, rage, pettiness—and the second—wonder, desire, and resolving to live in ambiguity.

Rachelle Toarmino on "A WORD FOR IT"
Color exterior head shot of Vijay Seshadri
"Writers writing about him, baffled by the limitations of discourse itself, can seem like interlocutors at a seminar table ignoring the tiger that happens to be pacing the classroom."

via PEN TRANSMISSIONS
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Cover of Roo Borson's book, Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida
What Sparks Poetry: Sandra Lim on Roo Borson's Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida

"She finely accumulates detail in her descriptions, absorbing the tensions of her own human awareness of nature, and the notions of animal consciousness and even the absence of consciousness. She manages to remain both reverent and witty; in the same poem, she interjects, 'Do you still love poetry?'"
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