I wish I’d learned to take better careAs if this world tried to love meA body I used upon hard ground, flowsy &sop-studded, misplacing wordsI keep to settle for painPitch breaks in—body leaning into quietI couldn’t ask for, what I needed& thought I couldn’t afford. A shun,undone, a hush a shudder throughthinned fascicles of flesh &flimsy bone, walkwardin a lost idiom. Are we on a heartway?We could pretend. Calculatehow immaculate hardshipcovets itselfActs like it aches for more
Anodyne
Khadijah Queen
Feature Date
- September 25, 2020
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“Anodyne” from ANODYNE by Khadijah Queen.
Published by Tin House August 2020.
Copyright © 2020 by Khadijah Queen.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Photo:
Michael Teak
Michael Teak
Khadijah Queen is the author of Conduit, Black Peculiar, Fearful Beloved, Non-Sequitur, and I’m So Fine: A List of Famous Men & What I Had On. A finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Balcones Poetry Prize, and the CLMP Firecracker Award in Fiction, she is an assistant professor of creative writing at University of Colorado at Boulder, and serves as core faculty for the low-residency Mile-High MFA program at Regis University.
“Khadijah Queen outdoes herself with captivating poems examining the dualities of joy and pain, love and loss, knowing and ignorance.”
—Ms. Magazine
“Insightful on every level, Anodyne will stay with you long after you turn its final page.”
—Bustle
“Khadijah Queen is a brilliant poet. I recommend this book to anyone who ever had a child or a parent, who ever had a body or loved, to anyone who was ever sick or tried to sleep a good night’s sleep, and failed, and tried again. . . . This is a powerful and dazzling collection, filled with wisdom and experience. Anyone who reads Anodyne will remember it for a long time.”
—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic
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