F_el_ Note: Glacier Dream

Felicia Zamora | Poetry

Block Poem

I imagine myself one of a pair of sedimentary rocks. A varve. Couplet of alternating layers. Coarser

summer sediment with finer winter sediment. Even the glacial lake preforms poetry. Each couplet

an annual cycle. To be counted in a type of dendrochronology. Count my layers. The coarse grains

of me mix with the smoother, suspended part of me. Call me winter. Call me summer. Hundreds of

couplets churn inside me. It’s true, I am unable to reconstruct myself. To determine my own season

from the myth of singularity.

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. 