Kelli Russell Agodon

Devotion for a Cosmo That Can’t Contain Us

The night I read to you while we rested 
on the roof of the library, radiant as the nebula 
     starlings we fell in love with, birds 
     built nests with lines from our poems.

Those evenings, the hours were ours,
we munched on comets, became fat from so much
     sparkle. Wouldn’t we grow to be women
     who’d embroider their shirts with sundown,

mend our lives to include miracles and minor planets?
What happens when someone’s fear
     paints itself over a prism of universe?
    Those stars? Those satellites? You can’t

hold them back, they keep their resolve, never
lose their light. That night we held each other
     as a meteor burned into the atmosphere
     —O the price I’d pay to still be that aflame.

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Kelli Russell Agodon is a bi/queer poet and editor. Her newest book, Dialogues with Rising Tides by Copper Canyon Press, was named a Finalist in the Washington State Book Awards and shortlisted for the Eric Hoffer Book Award Grand Prize in Poetry. She is the co-founder of Two Sylvias Press, where she works as an editor and book cover designer. Her other books include Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room (Winner of the Foreword Indies Book of the Year in Poetry, Washington State Book Finalist, and a contender for the Julie Suk Prize), The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts for Your Writing Practice (co-authored with Martha Silano) and the newly released Demystifying the Manuscript: Essays and Interviews on Creating a Book of Poems, co-edited with Susan Rich. Kelli teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop, Pacific Lutheran University’s low-res MFA program. She also co-hosts the poetry series Poems You Need with Melissa Studdard. She lives in a sleepy seaside town and is an avid paddleboarder and hiker. www.agodon.com / www.twosylviaspress.com