Of instinct, and: Propulsion
Rent from DeepDyve- Of instinct, and: Propulsion
Of instinct
The woman in the life vest looks through binoculars; the orca whale turns the great white shark on its back; a simple act, how a child floats in water, plugs her nose & puffs out her cheeks; the shark enters torpor; she breathes heavy & smiles into the camera, not supposed to happen; the orca holds the shark upside down until the shark suffocates; what do we really know of instinct; let’s just say powerful, powerful brain; & when we speak of animals, of mammalian anything, we mean other, or other than; always in think of us; consider all the never supposed to happens; the list stretches: a rainbow of possibilities; you trace the prismatic color arc back with your head; to lay down in drops of rain; you imagine the shark deep in calm, the familiar waters, a thought, just before.
Propulsion
Banshee, how that’s you, folded so; how we all wail first from inside; what propels the tongue when; remember the metal on blocks, the rust of, the gravel drive; remember you in vinyl seats, feet in dangle, window cranked down; the heat of every moment in refraction of windshield to forehead & the words dirty little Spic in sear at your ear drum, just before. [End Page 166]
Felicia Zamora is the author of the books Of Form & Gather, winner of the 2016 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize (u of Notre Dame p), & in Open, Marvel (Parlor Press), and Instrument of Gaps (Slope Editions). Of Form & Gather was listed in the article “9 Outstanding Latino Books Recently Published by Independent and University Presses” by NBC News. She won the 2015 Tomaž Šalamun Prize from Verse, and authored two chapbooks. Her published works may be found or are forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Hotel Amerika, Indiana Review, jubilat, Meridian, North American Review, OmniVerse, Pleiades, Poetry Daily, Cincinnati Review, Georgia Review, TriQuarterly Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Verse Daily, West Branch, and others. She is an associate poetry editor for the Colorado Review and holds an mfa in creative writing from Colorado State University.
