A Worm Moon In June 2025
Welcome to A Worm Moon, a poetry newsletter where I, Phoenix Yemi, share what I've been reading and writing through the month.
What happens when the rain doesn’t fall?
I believe that love, at its core, is expansive. Not just a feeling but that the doing, the expression, the openness of love is what coaxes the flower into bloom. And when the rain doesn’t fall, we water the garden ourselves.
To mark the release of The Love Issue: Worms 10, I want to begin with a fragment from “You Are Who I Love” by Aracelis Girmay. To quote Hanif Abdurraqib, this is a poem that fuels tenderness, a kind of love, that says: I want a better world I want a better world, not just for myself. But for you, and you, and you, and you, and and and.
I want a love that shines, that listens, that dares to imagine the world otherwise.
This is the river running through these poems: love as reach, as risk, as repair.
1
The ache of yearning turned golden. The quiet knowledge that love is both a sensual and transformative force. That it is possible to reconcile sorrow with meadow. That tenderness will outlast pain.
2
The poems travel between friends, and I want to say: this poem reminds me of you.
And what binds us is a language gathered over time, and how we know what she means when she writes rabbit, and what I mean when I write water.
The poems travel between friends, across the Thames, an image on WhatsApp; on iMessage, I ask him to read it to me in a voice note— to stretch out the vowel sounds in mountain, in moaning. His favourite line is we’ll cum unhooked in time, I laugh and think later about how it lands like a switch, a howl, an explosion of stars. I like the rust. The steel singing get on me— the image like a prayer, like an urgent email of want.
From the collection Rabbit by Sophie Robinson.
3
Wild Horses, Grey Angels. I Want No Breath to Part Us. This is a redraft of a poem I wrote a month ago that includes a poem I wrote a year ago. It tells what love does— how it fractures and heals, how we must bind ourselves to hope to make both falling and rising in love possible.
I think a fear of intimacy, amongst many things, is what plagues us. We’re afraid to hurt, so we give nothing; we turn away. But sometimes, the hurt is what makes the possible the growth. And I can, and I did survive this.
I think what I mean is surrender — and trust that you are held. For me, the angels are invisible, the horses symbolic, but that’s my world.
Image used: Somaya Critchlow, Your Beloved, 2024
4
Two poems. Sonia Sanchez and Audre Lorde. The first poem is playful, is how it feels when your smile can’t contain the joy of another person and the heat, the pleasure in the collapsing, the breathlessness, the unity. The second collapses the boundaries between the body and the earth to write a love between women that is holy, urgent, erotic. It rises, and soon you are sucked into the howling.
5
To fall in love. The bubble. Your clouds are pink, and the stars hang low and bright as if to observe the shimmer that surrounds you both. But what extends beyond the dome, I’m afraid— of the city like a needle and how it threatens the world you’re building. This poem is an expression of the anxiety.
P.S
Imagine a declaration of love. What do you want spoken to you? My first thought is Beneath My Hands by Leonard Cohen. The imagery of the sparrows, the hidden mouths of stone and light, I melt. His gaze is tender and erotic.
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 💌
