A Worm Moon In January 2026
Welcome to A Worm Moon, a poetry newsletter where I, Phoenix Yemi, share what I've been reading and writing through the month.
January. I cross the threshold of twenty-seven in a room with a view of a small river and a blue bridge. It doesn't stop raining. And it dawns on me that what does not break will bend. The mornings are sharp and immediate, and I spend all month lingering on the question of what to do with what still hurts. I am surprised by my sensitivity.
There is poetry in the avoiding of things. I watch the sky turn from blue to black, and return only to the page when the feelings are beyond me and brimming. I could do with being softer to the people I love.
But anger. There is no word in the English language that could summon my father into being, again. I pray for again, and again.
And so I write. Because oranges are not lemons; because a bruise will continue to be a bruise if the blood does not clot. Sometimes it is painful. Still, I continue. I ask how to continue. I pray. I pray to trees I have avoided all winter.
1
This month I’ve been reading Bhanu Kapil and it has stayed with me in a way that feels physical. Not something I finish and move past, but a language that lingers, that alters my breathing. Her writing lets the body remain crumpled, blinking, unfinished, and it makes it possible to write without searching for resolution.
In Ban en Banlieue, 2015 the body becomes not an arc or a lesson, but a field of sensation, voltage, weather. Ban lies down on the pavement, in the dirt, beneath ivy, and these gestures feel less like collapse than a radical reorientation of attention. We are street level, mineral time.
In How To Wash A Heart, 2020 I am met with memory, with desire entangled with history, family, and the body's limit. I think she's writing what I cannot until I am ready. Sometimes refusal is a form of care.
2
Last month I shared the beginning of my year long project, Twelve Acts of Shelter.
Each month, a new house. Each house, a new performance. And what I find myself circling is grief. I wanted structure, something to keep my eyes on, but upon reflection, it's how to keep going inside it. I know I'm not alone, and the first event was proof of that.
Still though, I'm having trouble reconciling flesh with softness. All bones are brittle, and I don't know if flourishing is possible. But then the poetry, the poets, the music. Each carrying a bright sun. It was like a soft landing, a loosening, a bruise finally weeping.
This month, A Year of Houses continues with Act II on Tuesday 24th February. Here's the link, alongside an image of the small house and a poem to hold the evening.
3
From Chimera, 2024 by Phoebe Giannisi. What stays me with is the image of the white shell of a cricket floating on water. Bone as light as feather, shed. A shiny exoskeleton under starlight. And I am more than just myself when I focus my eye on the present moment. The body insists on porosity.
4
A poem of refusal. I was thinking about this Sylvia Plath quote in The Bell Jar, where the figs on the tree each promise a different future, and how she sat starving in the crotch of the tree, unable to choose, as the figs withered and fell. This poem feels like a refusal of that starvation. like an acceptance of hunger and what that means. I eat all the figs and accept the largeness of my appetite. Becoming without end. Breathing.
5
A kind of prayer and lament. A grief-song for what can't be saved. I'm a Capricorn, and the thread of this poem takes me from the sea-goat to the goat-song that shapes the ancient Greek word for tragedy. Some things don't yield to control, and the ceiling comes down, the floor gives out. Anger rises in the body like a tide. And so this poem is about keeping faith, about surrendering to the animal body and the fractured heart, even when the world feels like fishbones and wintering decay. In the ache, I stay alive.
6
Given that the recurring theme of much of my work at the moment is grief, I wanted to end with something lighter, more playful, and alive. I love how it moves through memory, desire, want, water. I want the warmth of an egg in my hands. I want to wrap my legs around his waist. I want an evening, a morning, in Cornwall.
What poems are you reading? Please share them with me, I’m compiling a document. You can email me by clicking on the button below (at phoenixyemi@gmail.com) or you can find me on Instagram @phoenixyemoja
💌 With Love, Phoenix 💌
