A Worm Moon In July 2025
Welcome to A Worm Moon, a poetry newsletter where I, Phoenix Yemi, share what I've been reading and writing through the month.
I'm somewhere between long evenings and full moons. Everything was sticky in July. It’s August now, and I’m tired, thinking of nothing and everything. I want you to love me.
There’s this poem by Dorothea Lasky, This Beautiful Planet. I want to email it to my parents, my mother in particular, and I want her to know that the world, even burning, can still hold us.
I hope the rest of the summer is kind to you, that if the moon calls out, we hear her, and we turn back, if only for a moment, to say thank you. May we feel the earth steady beneath us.
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I am fever and not focus, grass-stained and always searching for roots, cramming the black honey of summer into my mouth*. My angels are grey. And this poem is a plea for tenderness.
*From August by Mary Oliver
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The poems are an act of embodiment. What is an ‘I-do-bird sequence’ and why does the title sit inside me like an ache? Grief is never obvious. And we move on because we have to, like an almost-forgetting. But still, it’s there. I’ve never needed a book more.
Thank you, Kim Hyesoon, for Phantom Pain Wings and for ‘the realization of / I-thought-bird-was-part-of-me-but-I-was-part-of-bird sequence’. These poems are an invocation of self-mythology and bird ventriloquy, and I can feel dark wings fluttering inside of me.
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In July I watched The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire. It’s a beautiful film, experimental and slow in its unravelling. The images linger. Her story is told in fragments, and even then, it’s not really her story. It’s an anti-biopic.
Suzanne Cesaire didn’t want to be remembered, and instead, what you piece together is the weight of patriarchy and racism combined, and what it took from her. The gaps in her story haunt me.
One of the images that stayed with me was a horse dressed in dozens of pink bows. It took me back to the poem I wrote for Worms #9: The Psychoanalysis Issue. Here’s a fragment from it below. Click here to read the poem in its entirety.
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A painting by Danielle Mckinney, Shelter, 2023.
The poem is Sing Sky for Me. Nothing is impossible.
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From Forest of Noise by Mosab Abu Toha. A collection of poems written before, during, and after his escape from the current Israeli bombardment and genocide of Palestinians. His words carry the weight of survival, witness, and I am reminded that poetry is not a luxury, that this book is not a book, that “this is not a poem. / This is a grave, not / beneath the soil of Homeland, / but above a flat, light white / rag of paper.”
Thank you for reading. I hope you've liked the poetry.
What poems have you been reading this month?
If you feel like sharing, please send them my way. You can email me at phoenixyemi@gmail.com or you can find me on Instagram @phoenixyemoja
💌 With Love, Phoenix 💌
