A Poem About a Book About Venezuela by Mónica Gomery
Did the Psalmist feel done at the end
of his litany? Shaking and sweating
and words chipping off him?
Bruise-tremor of language—
a book of lush silences
inhaled, held breath
between title and end page
a phantom twin book
standing just to the left,
breathing its book breaths full of words I can sense
but can’t read, I don’t mean Spanish or English.
In this way too it is Bible, a book crowded
by words that aren’t actually
in it, in this way too it is codex
of love or survival.
By the book, meaning: there are rules to this.
Book about mountains, book about zinc,
book about grandeur, book about grief,
book of stories other people tell about book,
of words scrawled around book.
Book of leaving, arriving,
book about shades of green,
textbook of bird beaks,
album of economics.
Book of silt,
book of drowning,
book with multiple nations living inside.
Ghost book, book of souls,
book of soil, not maps.
Bookish, meaning: with or without other people.
Velvet leaves, binding loose,
labels unstuck from bottles.
Demonstration flyers
smothered
in petrol, lit to burn.
Book volcanic with glass
or aluminum, pressed into mirrors
not topographic or diagrammatic,
not a book containing
the right names for card games.
Book-ended: you have a beginning and you have a conclusion.
Coda of night sounds, thickening
night streets in hot cities, index of stars.
Unalphabetical, not
genealogical
and yes, book of revolutionary
figures cramming the spine.
How many immigrants does it take
to fasten a book, how many fingers bandage
its paper together, how many mouths press
the stitching, write it on air, audio recorded
in how many languages?
And where will the electricity
come from to power up the machine,
where will the microphone come from
when the oil runs out?
Back into the boat, bent pages, wet float.
Somewhere history-succulent, book
dripping with loss, pages droning
with question, illegible answers.
The Good Book: the great hulking mountain
from which book was born.
This poem was featured in Issue 08 of Canthius.
Mónica Gomery is a poet and rabbi living on unceded Lenni Lenape land in Philadelphia. Her work explores queerness, diaspora, ancestry, loss, theology, and cultivating courageous hearts. Her second collection, Might Kindred, won the 2021 Prairie Schooner/Raz-Shumaker Book Prize in Poetry. She is also the author of Here is the Night and the Night on the Road (Cooper Dillon Books, 2018), and the chapbook Of Darkness and Tumbling (YesYes Books, 2017). Her poems have been awarded the Sappho Prize for Women Poets and the Minola Review Poetry Contest. Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in Four Way Review, Muzzle Magazine, Adroit Journal, Poet Lore, and Poetry Northwest.