I Always Carry My Bones

The inheritance of pain is both cellular and creaturely in Felicia Zamora’s I Always Carry My Bones. Genetic, anatomical, and biological materiality pervade the collection, with its descriptions of the lively cavernousness of a body, as in “Lunch Money,” where the speaker, age six, is ashamed of her belly’s hunger growls, or in “Prayer to the Charcoal Dusk,” in which we learn that the “creases of your knuckles smell of placenta.” Zamora sees the body as a living archive and an aftermath, a way of rendering evidence of racial harm and migrant experience that is embedded in the lungs, ribs, and clavicles. In section IV of “Six Functions of Bone,” the poet writes, “Do you hear yourself being spoken into existence?” calling attention to the paradoxical way that dissection sometimes creates cohesion. It is here that I consider the “carry” of the title to be its most meaningful word, since Zamora’s microscopic gaze documents a poetic-scientific interiority that demands to be held and kept. In the poem, “& In the Body Keeping,” the poet writes “the body / inscribes this type of keeping, let us / whisper history to our forearms / & watch hairs rise in comprehension.” In other words, when bodies are rendered as specimen by violent epistemologies, our bodies document those who cast amnesia on that violence: “we lick to record the taste; we lick / the wound of us: nation / of forgetting, nation of omission.”