Look how the light bruisesthe sky, how the crickets shredquiet with their chatty back legs.Look how the potted plants opentheir palms for the sun, the back doorswings its hips, the dog leaps outalready talking, the house fillswith that silted reminder of firesup north and the stairs creakwith the confidence of somethingmen made. Morning has a wayof shoring up the good milk,strata of possibility takingthe coffee-stained stage. And you askagain for a day of celestial advances.You ask to be witnessed, wearingyour mother’s old shoes. Wearingthe sky’s yellow blue bruise.
Aubade With Selichot
Mónica Gomery
Feature Date
- April 24, 2024
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“Aubade with Selichot” by Mónica Gomery.
Published by The Kenyon Review in Winter 2024.
Copyright © 2024 by Mónica Gomery.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Mónica Gomery is a rabbi and poet. Her work explores queerness, diaspora, ancestry, theology, and cultivating courageous hearts.
Her second collection, Might Kindred, won the Prairie Schooner Raz-Shumaker Book Prize in Poetry, judged by Kwame Dawes, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and Hilda Raz, and was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2022.
She is also the author of the poetry collection Here is the Night and the Night on the Road (Cooper Dillon Books, 2018), and the chapbook Of Darkness and Tumbling (YesYes Books, 2017). Her poems have been awarded the Sappho Prize for Women Poets and the Minola Review Poetry Contest. She is a Tin House Workshop alum, has received a fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center, and has been featured on The Slowdown podcast. Recent poems appear in The Kenyon Review, Poetry Northwest, The Massachusetts Review, and West Branch, among other journals.
Winter 2024
Gambier, Ohio
Kenyon College
The David F. Banks Editor
Nicole Terez Dutton
Managing Editor
Abigail Wadsworth Serfass
Associate Editor
Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky
Poetry Editor
David Baker
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