Welcome to A Worm Moon, a poetry newsletter where I, Phoenix Yemi, share what I've been reading and writing through the month.

June has come and gone. Now it's July and I’m still thinking about the solstice, the longest day of the year, and how desperate I am for love.

I keep returning to ‘The Promise’ by Sharon Olds. I think about loneliness, and the poem is in the corner, singing partnership exists, singing love exists, the way you need it to be, “eye to eye, nipple to nipple, sex to sex”; it’s like this. Recently I’ve been thinking about burning that poem.

What I’m trying to say is my heart feels bruised and I don't know if I should write about it. I think I need to, and I think I need it to not be poetry. It's difficult to write.

I meant to arrive at Mary Oliver and her talking fox seamlessly. I don't know which thread to pull but I’m here now, so this has to be the moment. And it's perfect because I read the poem and it tells me to shut up, to be quiet and observe “the fact of every moment’s miracle.” God is the grass and the stars, and to hold that, everything else is inconsequential until it isn't.

1

I start to write, and the poem takes me to the river. Sometimes I’m writing about the water to show you ablution, sometimes it’s sadness, but this poem is mostly desire.

2

Mary Jean Chan. I spent this month with their collection ‘Flèche’, and I want to share with you three poems. My favourite is ‘One Breath’. It tugs at you, and you hear it, the sound a body makes as “a cry becomes the world”, and you know it, that sometimes grief is not safe, not when it troubles the waters. The poem calls attention to tragedy, to the ripple effect of colonial violence, intergenerational trauma, and how it is held in our bodies. The second is ‘Wish’, and it’s true that I’ve also been “trying to write a poem that might birth a tree”, that I’m looking, and I cannot figure out how to genuinely accept myself. The third is ‘Names (II)’.

3

When I started this poem, I was thinking about the photograph ‘Waterbearer’ by Lorna Simpson, about Grace Nichols and her first collection ‘I is a Long-Memoried Woman’ and about bell hooks and her book ‘Art on My Mind: Visual Politics’. I wanted to write to tell you more about the poem, but this is the river I don’t understand, and nothing leaves my mouth but rain.

4

I don’t know how not to mention Louise Glück. I’m still carrying around her big book of poems. Today, I want to give you ‘Lamium’ and tell you that sometimes you have to make your own light.