DANIELLE ZIPKIN

FALL/WINTER 2020 ISSUE #01 POET

Danielle Zipkin lives in Brooklyn and teaches humanities to middle schoolers. When she isn’t teaching or writing poetry or quarantining, she enjoys traveling on credit card points, scuba diving shipwrecks, choreographing moody dances, eating street food, and posting updates about her plants. Follow her Instagram @dalyssaz

AMERICAN WELL

I am asking you to unshed your spark and rot.
Follow me through the loud misunderstoods.
Trail the threaded testimonies back to their honest
looms. Ripple your reflection and drink. Backhand
dry your own mouth. You know how light feels in your lungs,
how breath is both engine and gun in any laned race.

I am asking you to quick-clip the vines worming up
the cherry tree, and weave that green into a righteous dam
that wells the scum-mouthed speech into a swamp
that never reaches America’s loamy lawn. To care
for the body is to tender its weakest places.

I am asking you to muddy your belly, to undermine
this stolen home, to tunnel through foundation and grave, just
us and the promise of a country lapping, finally, from a clear well.