01-18-2023
Ruth Ellen Kocher
COSMOGONY
i begin with ocean
floating in the free space of my ribs
somewhere between
ursa major and Ursa Minor
i begin in scorpio
a car ride into the city
before andromeda collided with the milky way another timeline ago
I begin as a cluster of muscadine grapes bursting bloody on their stems
i begin at the end
hungry
gorged on the ill-shaped stars which had
not yet begun
i begin beaten by my own hands
a comet galaxy
orbiting the parking lot of stumblin' inn friday nights waiting for a wrong turn
in the right car
i begin as a side bet
a detour into cosmos
via the elliptical path of my thumbprint
i begin as magellan's cloud hovering above
a cartwheel galaxy before magellan imagined himself
i begin as a call into
the deep-deep
as a black eye begging my way into medusa merger
i begin
as something found and then lost
as a clutch
meaning a small group
as in a small group of mothers huddled around a baby fever-charged
i begin with nothing
no history no moons
HOW I AM BORN
three days before
my mother dies
she says
i'm glad i kept you
CEPHALOGENISIS
in november
a lie fertilizes an embryo
in december
panic begins
in january
her mother calls her whore
the northeastern sky is crisp
brutal
the trees are raked hands
everywhere
in a very fine suit
malcolm is gunned down
february
has no mercy
the bullet tunnels
a quantum path
through the badlands
behind time
march is bloody
selma will never heal
july becomes my body becoming
Ruth Ellen Kocher is the author of godhouse (Omnidawn Press, 2023); Third Voice (Tupelo Press 2016); the 2013 Noemi Book Prize selection Ending in Planes (Noemi Press, 2014); Goodbye Lyric: The Gigans and Lovely Gun (Sheep Meadow Press, 2014); domina Un/blued (Tupelo Press, 2013), winner of the Dorset Prize and the 2014 PEN/Open Book Award; One Girl Babylon (New Issues Press, 2003); When the Moon Knows You’re Wandering (New Issues Press, 2002), selected for the Green Rose Prize; and Desdemona’s Fire (Lotus Press, 1999), a Naomi Long Madgett Prize selection. Her poems appear or will appear in many anthologies, including Best American Experimental Writing, Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poets, Black Nature, From the Fishouse, An Anthology for Creative Writers: The Garden of Forking Paths, IOU: New Writing On Money, and New Bones: Contemporary Black Writing in America.Kocher has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Cave Canem Foundation, and Yaddo. She is a contributing editor at Poets & Writers magazine and serves on the Board of Directors for RASA: Race, Solidarity, and the Arts. She has taught poetry writing at the University of Missouri, Southern Illinois University, the New England College low residency MFA program, the Indiana Summer Writer’s workshop, and Washington University’s Summer Writing program. She currently teaches poetry, poetics, and literature at the University of Colorado-Boulder.
