Desiree C. Bailey, 2017 Poets House Emerging Poets Fellow
In Her Shadows, a Map
Fleshed cartographies, a blood work, akin to the moon’s map, its shadowed witness, its rerouting through a house of skin, pulped and spilling down the thigh, a small breath into the soil choked with haints. To explore the escape, the body lilting across the uncharted edge of terrain, or the unescape, the fallopian as factory assembling tools to tend the field, the lubrication as evidence of a weeping or a wound. The exploration: not a dwelling in but the carving of a desire line, a new footpath to the oracle’s ear, reseeing the past to replot the prophecy.
Desiree Bailey was born in Trinidad and Tobago, and grew up in Queens, NY. She is the author of the fiction chapbook In Dirt or Saltwater (O’Clock Press, 2016). Her poetry and fiction has been published in Best American Poetry, Callaloo, The Rumpus and Transition, among other publications. She has an MFA from Brown University and has received fellowships from The Norman Mailer Center, Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Kimbilio and Princeton in Africa. She is also a recipient of the Poets and Writers Amy Award. Desiree lives in New York, where she teaches literature and creative writing.
www.desireecbailey.com.