Felicia Zamora

Abecedarian for My Estranged Mexican Tongue

Antecedent bellows             cállate chica             deciduous (descendent) erasure

                       fantasized                             gutturals

                homage injury justifies killing language             la llaga

mandible naturalized (neutralized)                     ñoñería obliterate phonetics

                         queres recitation (recuerdo)                     arreglas skull

trachea & uvula vicissitudes          welkin xyloid, yields             zero (zeniths).

Felicia Zamora is the author of six books of poetry including, Quotient (2022), I Always Carry My Bones, Iowa Poetry Prize winner (2021), Body of Render, Benjamin Saltman Award winner (2020), and Of Form & Gather, Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize winner (2017). She’s received fellowships and residencies from CantoMundo, Ragdale Foundation, and Tin House. She won the 2020 C.P. Cavafy Prize from Poetry International, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, the Tomaž Šalamun Prize, and a 2022 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Her poems appear in Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Guernica, Orion, Poetry Magazine, The Nation, and others. She is an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Cincinnati and associate poetry editor for the Colorado Review.