KIMBERLY ALIDIO

After Alex Tizon’s article "My Family’s Slave" as regards Eudocia Tomas Pulido 

(The Atlantic, June 2017)

SPECTACULAR INDWELLING

Approach in a dance move embrace civics

Virtue of sensations bubbling springs

Ladies expose defilement in delicate thongs

What’s owed. The truth! Runaway tells how rare.

Pity such offense unto greatness

Forgive not staying dead long after rising heart

Belong! Help berate. Teach to scrub as if life depends

Somehow costs so much cheap and pretty.

The prettiest stolen branches a sudden graft

Trust a hero in both morals pure to just

Everyone wound being cost and benefit

Nothing isn’t allegory gone viral.

Nightmares floating without tether

Whistle time-place of greeting

Struggle to ferry but sent back refusal

A sine wave and small boat of plaster.

Lieutenant gifts to his twelve-year-old daughter

Stand in for He who gave us to model minorities

Lola always and already had cruel irony

Joyful luminous sorrowful glorious.

In suffocating the closest thing to bruise

Present for judgment. Honorific vigils to catch

Never without gifting graces to keep

Penetrate with shame. Love what binds.

Kimberly Alidio wrote After projects the resound (Black Radish, 2016) and solitude being alien (dancing girl press, 2013). She is the inaugural artist-in-residence at the Center for Art and Thought and a poetry fellow of Kundiman and VONA. She received fellowships from Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program and the University of Illinois’s Asian American Studies Program, as well as a doctorate in modern American history from the University of Michigan. A tenure-track dropout and high-school teacher, she hails from Baltimore and lives in East Austin, Texas.