Jennifer Maritza McCauley

I ask you only for poetry tonight, not bread or fast-winded salvation. Tonight, the lights

are bleak and the moon is a hot mouth opening white and I can hear poems crooning

through the branches, wedged in the trees, blooming from bushes, unspooling from the

thirstiest of leaf-pores.

I am a moon too, glowing Black and engulfing. I am ingesting all of this poetry, a

blessing streaming from willow trees. The words, in their little raindrops, the pain, in

the treble of these sentences.

I ask you for only poetry tonight, and I ask for it desperately, in every iteration of

lushness, I widen and expand and let it enrich the worst parts of myself, the parts that I

sit out for saving, the parts I’ll show you when you are most dire.

Tonight, I hold you poem, immortal as moon, in my flimsy hands and trail your

ribboning exit into some kind of eternity.

Jennifer Maritza McCauley is the author of the IPPY award-winning cross genre collection SCAR ON/SCAR OFF, the poetry collection KINDS OF GRACE and the short story collection WHEN TRYING TO RETURN HOME. Her work has been called a New York Times Editors' Choice, Best Fiction Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews, Must Read Book of 2023 by the Chicago Public Library, a Most Anticipated by Today,and  a Must-Read by Bookshop. She has been granted fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Kimbilio and CantoMundo and have been published recently in Boston Review, Columbia Journal, Academy of American Poets and Verse Daily. She received my MFA from FIU and my PhD from the University of Missouri. She is presently an assistant professor at the University of Houston-Clear Lake, faculty at Yale Writers' Workshop and fiction editor at Pleiades.