[When I come home they rush to me, the flies]

Aracelis Girmay

Work (plain text):

[When I come home they rush to me, the flies]
Aracelis Girmay
Poem

When I come home they rush to me, the flies, & would take me, they would take me in their small arms if I were smaller, so fly this way, that way in joy, they welcome me. They kiss my face one two, they say, Come in, come in. Sit at this table. Sit. They hold one hand inside the other & say, Eat. They share the food, sit close to me, sit. As I chew they touch my hair, they touch their hands to my crumbs, joining me. The rim of my cup on which they perch. The milky lake above which. They ask for a story: How does it begin? Before, I was a child, & so on. My story goes on too long. I only want to look into their faces. The old one sits still, I sit with it, but the others busy themselves now with work & after the hour which maybe to them is a week, a month, I sleep in the room between the open window & the kitchen, dreaming though I were the Sierra, though I were their long lost sister, they understand that when I wake I will have to go. One helps me with my coat, another rides my shoulder to the train. Come with me, come, I say. No, no, it says, & waits with me there the rest whistling, touching my hair, though maybe these are its last seconds on earth in the light in the air is this love, though it is little, my errand, & for so little I left my house again.

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Biography:

Aracelis Girmay was born and raised in Santa Ana, California. She received a BA from Connecticut College in 1999 and went on to earn an MFA in poetry from New York University.

Girmay is the author of the black maria (BOA Editions, 2016), for which she was a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature; Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions, 2011), winner of the Isabella Poetry Award and a finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Award; and Teeth (Curbstone Press, 2007), winner of the GLCA New Writers Award.

Girmay was awarded a Whiting Award in 2015, and the judges’ citation notes that

her project seems to be our deep and ongoing subjectivity, our vulnerability to history, to one another, to desire, and to the belief in something large and lasting that we might belong to. There’s empathy, play, and fearlessness here, and both formal and emotional range.

Girmay is also the author and collagist of the picture book, changing, changing (George Braziller, 2005). With her sister, she collaborated on the picture book What Do You Know? (Enchanted Lion, 2021). She has received awards and fellowships from Cave Canem, Civitella Ranieri, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Girmay is currently the editor-at-large for BOA Editions’ Blessing the Boats Selections, and she is on the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund. Girmay lives in New York City.