ARTICULATING POETRY – POETRY BY GEORGINA MARIE

Something came to me on a frost-chewed winter morning.
15 years I had lived
rarely touching my feet to the snow.
Now 30 years of living, the snow has melted and returned many times;
each time new words,
each time a new winter.

I don’t know how melon-drenched words come to me in shapes of edible stars
feeding me with a literal sustenance,
built as earthmovers writing themselves
into terms of endearment, into life altering stanzas
and continue to imprint their weight into the moistened ground,
always a few steps ahead and a few steps behind mine.

They are as real as papercuts,
coating the wounds like honey. 

I am asked to articulate where this comes from.
What can I say besides one day I woke up choking on air
and found words on the floor beneath me.
No explanation.
Every color, every texture.
No education to it, 
no explanation at all.

It is unknown why cherubs live inside my stomach and jubilee carve words
into the inside lining - 
cheering excitedly when they know they are being written,
when they hear them spoken,
when they feel they are about to choke
a new life out of me. 

Georgina Marie Guardado

Georgina Marie Guardado is the Poet Laureate of Lake County, CA for 2020-2024, the first Mexican-American and youngest to serve in this role, and a Poets Laureate Fellow with The Academy of American Poets. She is the Literary Editor for The Bloom, a contributing writer for Antioch University’s Common Thread News, President of the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference, and Literacy Program Coordinator for the Lake County Library. As of 2021, she serves as President of WordSwell, a literary journal and nonprofit organization founded by Bay Area Beat poet Clive Matson. As part of the Broken Nose Collective, an annual chapbook exchange, she created her first poetry chapbook, Finding the Roots of Water, in 2018 and her second chapbook, Tree Speak, in 2019. She has received support from the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference, Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, Hugo House, and SF Writing Salon. Her work has appeared in The Bloom, Noyo Review, Poets.org, Humble Pie Magazine, Gulf Coast Journal, Yellow Medicine Review, The Muleskinner Journal, Colossus: Freedom, and Two Hawks Quarterly. She lives with her rescue dogs Kenya and Micco and her formerly feral cat Mistie, and is currently working on her full-length poetry manuscript, The Length of Trauma Covets.

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