Claressinka Anderson
Michelle Boisseau Prize Winner
This is Not the Mouth
meant to kiss me
but here it is a breath
close to my face
lush fiction
covering my own
These are not the words I know
the ones that crest
every night along my back’s curve
But the lips just seconds
from my face
are not an abstraction
They belong to the irrefutable world
where transgression is both ordinary
& ordinarily punished
I’ll live in the two wet mouths
of this poem forever
Over & over on a plate
I’ll deliver my eyes
like Saint Lucy
unseeing to run my hands
along the fervors of the day
to know these lips
now scathing mine
Not everything
wrong is wrong
My body already bears
the sentence My mouth offers
Claressinka Anderson’s poems and essays have appeared in Best New Poets 2022, Los Angeles Review of Books, Autre Magazine, bedfellows, Chiron Review, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles (Carla), and elsewhere, as well as in the anthology, Choice Words: Writers on Abortion (Haymarket Books, 2020). Through her ongoing collaborations with artists, her work engages the interstitial spaces of contemporary art, literature, and music. She recently wrote her first libretto, and the opera is now in development. Anderson holds an MFA in writing and literature from Bennington College. Born and raised in London, she lives in Los Angeles and dreams about rain. You can find her at claressinka.com.
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