Ja'net Danielo
Ja'net Danielo is the author of This Body I Have Tried to Write, winner of the MAYDAY 2022 Poetry Micro Chapbook Editors' Choice Award, and The Song of Our Disappearing (Paper Nautilus, 2021). A recipient of a Courage to Write Grant from the de Groot Foundation, a Professional Artist Fellowship from the Arts Council for Long Beach, and the Telluride Institute's Fischer Prize, her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in swamp pink, Diode, Raleigh Review, Frontier Poetry, and In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy (Black Lawrence Press, 2024), among other places. Originally from Queens, NY, Ja'net lives in Long Beach, CA, where she facilitates Word Women: Poetry Heals, a free virtual poetry workshop series for cancer patients and survivors. You can find her at Poetry at jdanielo.com.​



FOR THE BODY AS CORNERED GAZELLE



In Arabic, 
the word for

gazelle is, too, 
the word for 

the wail 
of a gazelle 

when it’s 
wounded 

& cornered 
& knows 

death 
is coming. 

And haven’t you 
always been 

this: thing 
& sound 

of a thing, 
guttural cry-

turned-flash 
of light 

searching for 
a sky 

to hold it? How, 
all those years, 

you shrunk 
your heart 

because it 
demanded 

too much 
breath. 

How you 
stotted, 

offered yourself 
to blue, over 

& over, 
at the first sign 

of threat. 
So back into 

the pine now, 
into its salt-

encrusted leaves. 
Slip your slender 

legs between 
smooth, slender 

branches until 
your red coat 

wears the salt 
like cloudy white 

jewels, until it 
disappears 

into the bark’s 
red furrows. 

Let the green-
brown borders 

of branch 
& tree dissolve, 

blur 
with your own. 

Here it is—
the moment, 

all fang 
& yellow eyes, 

wet mouth
open. 
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