in the mountains, we remove our clothes those costume carcasses, charter atlas
rid ourselves of sorrow, its mediocrity its hesitant ache, savants of the massifs
we erode, set fire to the broken sands, hover beside them
catch, glory: the slow burn of it all tetras of a lost moon, tearing into our chests
gravity sans kinetic we have learned to climb out of each other
ruined cages, manifest: gods in us all the confessions of our climax, allowed to atrophy
or expand like the eviscerated land, with her fat highways
stretched, her blood-orange border laced, hitched & heavy around her waist
rivers
between the which ways, flooding hot & quick between her rocky columns
in our ritual: the mock of the beginning between the moonrise, the sun-slip
in hungering spaces our bodies knock, cyclically
in sync with the other unknown; crashing molasses
into stone, over the rim of the world we move, from exit to existence
but always home, the spheres of our songs harbor: heat
crawl back into our bodies heavy, singed renegades, witnesses
Contributor Notes
Faylita Hicks is a Black, Queer writer, mobile photographer, performance and Hip-Hop artist from San Marcos, TX. She was 2009 Grand Slam Champion of the Austin Poetry Slam and member of the 2007 and 2008 Neo Soul Poetry Slam teams. Her manuscript was a finalist in the 2016 Write Bloody Book contest and 2012 Button Poetry Chapbook contest. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Cosmonauts Avenue, Ink & Nebula, American Poetry Journal, Yes Poetry, AIPF Di-verse-city Anthology and others. In 2015, she released her first Hip Hop EP, Collision City. She is the founder and Creative Director of Arrondi Creative Productions and an artist on the roster for Hip-Hop collective Grid Squid Entertainment. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Sierra Nevada College’s Low Residency program and received her Bachelor’s Degree from Texas State University in San Marcos, TX.
She is currently working on her manuscript, GLOW and a new EP, Neon Glow.
Twitter: @FaylitaHicks
