All in Poetry
Always a poet or twenty to celebrate in December. Their work, as sentinel, watching weaving wearing the frayed grief and pulsing creativities of a whole year. Imagine! Twelve months worth of words queerly catalogued- ready to reference in this next project we call 2026.
I look out at lusty blue on blue of horizon, past where I saw a whole fox, tail still fluffy, fire orange fur, frozen solid in deep winter,
as hard as questions in my head’s hollow, “How? How is this possible?” No answer- the round reality that each day dispenses
loses its flavor after minutes flat. Yet the magic!! cracks open, loud Loud frozen water.
Like my mama said last month after I tried to convince her drinking diet coke is not the same as drinking water, “Dammit honey, sometimes you just have to hydrate your pleasure!” I paused, laughed aloud on the phone, and exclaimed, “That is brilliant!”
sitting with things to say, suspended in time,
learning how to control the blooming of my colors.
I am a queer container. Who came into organizing
for the electric eel of imagined change.
Peace for Palestine! and thank you Naomi Shihab Nye- a first teacher about Palestine, a poet whose words changed me at a reading in Texas in 1994.
in shapes of epistolary love
in queering quiet intimacies
in love language of spaciousness
Calvocoressi brilliantly uses the segno symbol as a pronoun throughout the book of poems, “representing a confluence of genders in varying degrees, not either/or nor necessarily both in equal measure. It is simultaneously encompassing and fluctuating, pronounced by me with the intake of breath when a body is unlimited in its possibilities.” Rockets of Desire defined on the page- and queerly expanded as well.
A poem about the seasonality of nature’s events, the heart’s too. As in we love for a season, or two, or three, but oh how free if we admit, not for four.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about feminist art of the femme body, especially the body of a self-identified woman of color. I wanted to write a poem that was like slowing down a sentence. I want the present tense to listen to its possible futures, and to ask, ‘What kind of power of undoing is wielded by being undone?’” - Kimberly Alidio