Alexis Almeida
POEM IN WHICH EVERYTHING I SAY IS TURNING TOWARD THE SUN IN JANUARY
Light and days, days and light, light fallen-down, move the sun into the wet grass and fall, a wooly hum, a capitulating mind, I only want to only think about things reflecting outward heat, all these rings, showering color, and what I can only understand to be true, a score is not just settling into a flavor, the line drawn out of the sand, blasting through a wave in the Pacific, projecting out across a blurred saxophone in a photograph, blinking in twos, holding still like a castle, painting a face, the heat no longer keeping flowers to a season, all lush caprice, walking into the museum of childhood, green paintings and charms, the Pollock, the Bonnard, what are the windows in the drawing, who is the ceramic bird, small jumps and breaths, the way a pyramid pours, drying summer, lifting brick from stone, I try to measure each new thing, but music does break something, whatever family is, breath over breath, tender or wild, a cloud can look at you, the yellow inside the sky, I think you would like it here
SOME THINGS I’VE SHARED
Relief, a few accidentally long drives, a few decadent meals, some notes on hair-braiding, a few funny confessions, like my very low childhood voice, a crush on several friends, and a song that’s your name, last year’s pear-shaped puzzle piece, being naked in the creek, contempt for the administrators, an illustrated list of dinosaurs, the cost of several preschools, a PDF about Bas Jan Ader’s photographs, a struggle with loss, anxiety over my parents’ various illnesses, the places I want to go when Ash can remember it, the way I picture Porto, a desire to leave everything, a desire have stayed where I was, my salary and my signature, a fictional sense of direction, a reading group in Leora’s perfect apartment, useless exaltation, tears in the bodega, the things with my old friends who were always old from the beginning
Alexis Almeida grew up in Chicago. She is the author of I Have Never Been Able to Sing (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018) and Things I Have Made a Fiction (Oversound, 2024). Her translation of Roberta Iannamico’s Many Poems is also recently out with The Song Cave, and her first full-length collection, Caetano, will be out with Ugly Duckling Presse in 2026. She teaches at the Bard Microcollege at the Brooklyn Public Library and Pratt Institute. She lives in New York with Ash and Tina and edits 18 Owls Press.