National Poetry Month : Samuel Ace,

 

New star my navigator   

 

 

 

I

A silent moat monkey alive inside a snowfall    no way to get home    I run free in my dreams but all the farms pass me by    the feature writers on the news take note of a major storm    the past not unlike the comics we called funnies    the only color in the black and white pages of the Sunday morning paper    we fought over them and lucky charms    bellies full of milk and pastel

 

II

The bicentennial a faded procession painted on a Red Hook wall    birds now disappeared in the half century since    a music of twisted beams and broken logs where moans of pleasure ricochet off the crumbling piers      

 

III

New star my navigator    twenty-two days into a pristine year    already here with a finitude I don’t recognize    a slow rain and the long pungent aisles of the grocery store where I seem to taste the leather sandals on the dark-haired man near the cash register and the musk incense brought down from a high shelf by a tall woman in blue    a tired baby in my arms who only wants every string of yellow pom poms hanging four deep at the door  

 

 

 

 

 

Samuel Ace is a trans/genderqueer poet and sound artist. He is the author of several books, most recently Our Weather Our Sea, and a chapbook of the same name; Meet Me There, Normal Sex & Home in three days. Don’t wash., and Stealth with poet Maureen Seaton. Other chapbooks include Madame Curie’s Notebook, The Road to the Multiverse, A minor history / of secret knowledge (all with Maureen Seaton) and What started / this mess, forthcoming from above/ground press. Ace is the recipient of the Astraea Lesbian Writer Award and the Firecracker Alternative Book Award in Poetry, as well as a repeat finalist for both the Lambda Literary Award and the National Poetry Series. Recent work can be found in Poetry, We Want it All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetry; Home is Where You Queer Your Heart, PEN America, Best American Experimental Poetry, Baest, and many other journals and anthologies. A book-length poetic essay, I Want to Start by Saying, is forthcoming from the Cleveland State University Poetry Center (2024).