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Intersectional feminist press featuring women and nonbinary creatives in our print and online journal, chapbooks, and broadsides.

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Cordella Press

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on abandoning the shipwreck for an island

July 10, 2022 cate clother

kyrah gomes

she has been saying goodbye to everything.

green tea at dusk. news of b-52 bombers

flying in one ear, out the other, always

t-minus twenty minutes to doomsday.

 

the chipped spot where someone threw a

vase & a temper tantrum last easter.

the imprinted image of refrigerated

trucks & lifeless bodies in brooklyn.

 

the poem about breakfast in a burnt house

except there is no breakfast & there is

no house. how tenderly you trace the

cereal box maze, loving an easy challenge.

 

the living room & all of its comorbidities:

skin the calloused bark of a cinnamon stick,

flinches of peeling paint. walls of asbestos,

watercolors fading in direct disobedience.

 

she will no longer use the first person.

she opens her mouth & only violins

spill out. isn’t it beautiful? how hanging

the moon can have so many meanings.

 

how we can measure the length of our cuts,

laugh in razor-edged exclamation points.

how yellow-bricked margarine still spreads

on the blistered facades of export sodas.

 

how quickly fruit rots with nowhere to rest.

how weight is trapped in the very vowels

of translation — a carrying of burdens

across time, countries, oceans. loyalty,

 

or submission. I is too selfish to swallow

upright, always keeping the jaw unhinged.

i is an island of relief in a sea of bluebirds,

or vultures, all singing beautifully, despite.

 

kyrah gomes

kyrah gomes (she/her) is a multidimensional artist and fresh fruit aficionado from nyc, currently in tampa, fl. she writes to create something tangible and is as much of a poet as any other human being. her poems have appeared in Thread Magazine, VIBE, The B’K, LEVITATE, Journal of Erato, and other publications. you can send her comments, hate mail, or your favorite playlists on instagram @kyrah.isabel, twitter @reveri3s, or via her website kyrahgomes.square.site.

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Welcome to Field Notes, featuring emerging and established women-identifying and nonbinary writers and artists.

Field Notes is edited by Kelly Riechers DiCristina, Molly Kugel, and Cate Clother.


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