F_el_ Note: Relational Chatter

Felicia Zamora | Poetry

First skymouth. Then gathering. Tongue licking land, licking mountains, lakes, air. Glacier’s

touch-language. I carry Smith’s term in my throat. Here before the climb up the Perito Moreno

Glacier. All I lick with my eyes. All I graze with my body. Traces of me left—lint of me

on your sweater, my six-sided form dissolves on your tongue, blow on the dresser—dust of me

in your lungs. Touch: relational chatter. How my body speaks—dents & dendrites alike. Dents I

give. Dents I receive. Dents signify the possibility of reshaping. I touch ice boulders. I hold

glacial bits in my palm. Imagine the delicate folds my body makes to fit inside each. Language

of cells. Thought, too, a language of energy. I pray to terminus: do not to recoil from my touch. My

fossil-fuel fingers. I pray to air: do not abandon me. My oil-clad organs. Worry what travel makes of

me. Each boot heel imprints the shore. I stand at the ablation zone. Loss almost hidden, almost

invisible on the glacier’s face.

Poem in communion with: Term “touch-language” is from Ice Geographies: The Colonial Politics of Race & Indigeneity In the Arctic. Jen Rose Smith. Duke University Press. Durham and London, 2025. Pg. 32.

Felicia Zamora is the author of eight poetry books including Murmuration Archives (Akrilica Series, Noemi Press 2026), Interstitial Archaeology (University of Wisconsin Press 2025) and I Always Carry My Bones (University of Iowa Press, Iowa Poetry Prize, Ohioana Book Award – Poetry). She won the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award, Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, C.P. Cavafy Prize, two Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards, and received support from CantoMundo, Tin House, and Yaddo. Her poems appear in The American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Boston Review, Ecotone, Gulf Coast, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review The Nation, Orion, Virginia Quarterly Review, and others. She’s a professor of poetry at the University of Cincinnati and a poetry editor for Colorado Review. 