FIRST WORDS
Golden Shovel for “last words” by Lucille Clifton
as a child, I never cried (mama)
calm & quiet in the corner, I
was cooler then, cooler than I am
now. perhaps this was an unforming
—a letting go of stillness out
of necessity. as a child of
snow from silver skies, silence was in my flesh
before sound could slink its way into
each crack & crevice. the
skin is a city, the city a skin of rubble
& base born again into sky. as a child of
fish on land & lions in water, the
one true thing was no solid ground
but plenty of rich soil. there
in the grass she will
press a finger of wet earth to her lips, be
curious for a new
mineral taste to feed the pink scars
of her cut mouth, be poised for a new
challenge among meaningless tests
of her senses. as a child, every new
reverberation in her ear will smother the silk “Mamas”
sewn into her muscles & all that noise will keep coming
into the soft matter in her soft skull spinning her around
Leena Soman Navani writes fiction, poetry, and reviews, and her writing has been featured with Pleiades and Muzzle among other publications. She’s the poetry reviews editor for The Rumpus. For her work across genres, she’s received support from the National Book Critics Circle, Catapult, BOAAT, Bread Loaf, the Visible Poetry Project, and the Bennington Writing Seminars, where she earned her MFA and was a 2023 Alumni Fellow. Her debut poetry manuscript was recently a finalist for the University of Wisconsin Press Brittingham and Felix Pollak Prizes in Poetry and BOA Editions’ A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize.
The Boiler 