A Worm Moon In September 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 want to preface this month's newsletter with a trigger warning for grief and loss. Some of the poems touch on these themes, and right now I can only code my poems as blue, as heavy rainfall. I'm okay, until I'm not.
And in the meantime, I'm grateful for the bright green parakeets, how they blend in with the leaves. I'm grateful for the sporadic bursts of red and burgundy in the flora, for the poetry, for the beauty of language, and for my enduring love for horses. It feels strange to have woken up one morning with dreams of wild animals.
And I'm grateful for Danielle Mckinney, for the elegance of the black women in her paintings. Their nails are painted red, a lit cigarette rests gracefully in their hands. Her world is one of repose, and if I close my eyes, I'm there too, at peace.
I hope you enjoy the poems this month. Thank you for reading.
1
I grew up around a language of faith. It sticks to you, it colours every interaction, and never quite lets go. An apple is never just an apple, and heaven belongs to you, not me. This poem lives in that space between prayer and silence. Right now, God feels like a foreign word, and love is rotting in my mouth. Sometimes language fails you, and what I am is caught in grief's echo; left behind.
2
The first poem is by Assata Shakur. The second was written by Audre Lorde as an act of solidarity in the face of state violence. It's a resurrection, a refusal to let her disappearance be complete. In the wake of her death, I wanted to honour that spirit, that eternal fire of resistance.
3
From A Sun Lady for All Seasons Reads Her Poetry, an album by Sonia Sanchez. She's saying we can be anything we want. I really want to believe that as truth.
4
What links these two poems is that they live side by side on my wall. When I place them in conversation, there’s a sense of clarity with what aches.
In my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell, Gwendolyn Brooks speaks from a pit of hunger, of hell, from a world that requires a woman, a creator, to store away her “dreams and works” for some later salvation. She teaches the discipline of survival, the slow work of storing the self away, of enduring the devil days with the hope that tenderness will not spoil in the dark.
Joy Harjo speaks against that forgetting. Her poem is an incantation against erasure, a call to remember what will outlive us. And I wonder if remembrance itself is a form of resistance, a refusal to let the self be ground down by the machinery. The world offers no meal but waiting, and Harjo says to look instead to the wild, to “remember the plants, trees, animal life…” Yes, nature is indiscriminate, sometimes cruel in the way things happen, but there is still, always, breath. Right now, survival is my present tense, but in the woods, I can live outside time.
Together, both poems form a cycle: descent and return, the ache and the balm. This is how you hold on, and this is how you learn to open your heart again.
5
I lost my dad on the 19th of September. I’m still searching for solid ground, I will be for a while, but the poems remain my anchor. This piece began in my frustration at the Tommy Robinson protest. It stuck a nerve because of my own complicated history with citizenship, and now with the loss of my dad, they feel inextricable. This poem is a prayer that moves through grief, migration, and the complicated love we have for the places that hold us. It’s about the contradictions of belonging. The full piece is available here,
6
I want to end with a poem that clung to me the first time I read it. I don’t know if I even fully understand it yet, but its quiet revelation, the question that only becomes a question at the end, “Enough of these lessons?” — and then the undoing that follows, “I myself am not myself,” left me breathless. I wanted to drown in it, dissolve, in that “inner luxury” “made dusky by stars" where the self merges with the world. It’s a beautiful poem, and I ache because sometimes words are just words, and I don’t know how to sustain this feeling of the first time you read a poem and how it's like falling into open arms. Seen. Held.
What poems are you reading?
Also, I want to say thank you to everyone who’s sent me poems. Please keep sharing them, 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 💌
