F_el_ Note: Withness
I came to the glacier with empty in mind. What empty leaves space for. Not about traversing the void
—the void itself. Memory, a void too. First memory: Sun on my forehead. M’s arms around my
waist. Alden Motel only backdrop. Whole world wrapped in tercets. First poem in me. Let me be an
apprentice to empty. Second memory: my body tucks in a curl of mulberry trunk. At dusk, my shadow
becomes tree-shadow. A softening. Who taught me of softness as weakness? I fight the urge to fill. Third
memory: You don’t have a father? Everyone has a father. Withoutness capitulates from interiority
influenced by exteriority. Some narratives designed to flatten. Some narratives deny saliency. Smith
writes, “Ice is land./ Ice is not land./ Ice is water./ Ice is not water./ Ice is air./ Ice is not air./ Ice is
empty./ Ice is not empty.” Ice defies human-centric labeling, imagining, extracting, harming. Born
of liminality, born of transmutation, born of entanglements, ice’s is-ness resounds beyond
humanness. The white, colonial agenda interested in reduction, objectification & oversimplification.
Techniques of empire to severe the relational, our coalitions to the more-than-human world. To
honor the materiality of ice—which encompasses ice as connective force bound to water, land, air—
I acknowledge simultaneity, constant-process. Being & becoming in tandem. I came here to be with
the glacier. Glacier not metaphor. I entangle with the glacier. The withness of our lifeforces as
framework for our shared futurity. Withness brought me here. Yes, dear universe, let me be with.
Chatter of voids. We the empty in our tectonic attraction. Our slow, deliberate troubling. We the
empty making room, extending, licking away edges. We the empty not afraid of loss, of separation,
even from ourselves.
Poem in communion with:
Ice Geographies: The Colonial Politics of Race & Indigeneity In the Arctic. Jen Rose Smith. Duke University Press. Durham and London, 2025. Pg. 31-35.
“water looks for difference in order to form new bonds and it is even willing to separate from itself.” “Waterways—Paths of Freedom and Justice for All,” Jennifer S. Leath. Gonna Trouble The Water: Ecojustice, Water, and Environmental Racism. Edited by Miguel A. De La Torre. The Pilgrim Press. 2021. Pg. 24–27.
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.
