Tuesday poem #270 : Felicia Zamora : Heliocentric

Consider the number of atoms in the human

body; now say seven billion billion billion, think

27 zeros as round & contracting as your pupil

in stare at the mid-day sky; most hydrogen,

oxygen, carbon; oh elements of you; consider

Archimedes’ The Sand Reckoner; what powers

of myriad myriad system; think M, think all the

mathematical symbols & what each represents; to

count the grains of sand fitted into a universe;

scour your flesh, cells; what do you represent;

think astrology; & you, in early winter sun think

yourself: just a simple grain in tilt, grain in orbit.

Felicia Zamora is the author of the books Of Form & Gather, winner of the 2016 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize (University of Notre Dame Press 2017), & in Open, Marvel (Parlor Press 2017), and Instrument of Gaps (Slope Editions, forthcoming). Of Form & Gather was listed as one of the “9 Outstanding Latino Books Recently Published by Independent and University Presses” by NBC News. She won the 2015 Tomaž Šalamun Prize from Verse, and authored two chapbooks. Her published works may be found or forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Crazyhorse, Hotel Amerika, Indiana Review, jubilat, North American Review, OmniVerse, Pleiades, Poetry Daily, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, The Cincinnati Review, The Georgia Review, TriQuarterly Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Verse Daily, Witness Magazine, West Branch,and others. She is an associate poetry editor for the Colorado Review and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Colorado State University. She is the 2017 Poet Laureate for Fort Collins, CO and the education programs coordinator for the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University. She lives in Phoenix, AZ with her partner Chris and their two dogs. 

 the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan