Danusha Lameris

Danusha Lameris lives and writes in Santa Cruz, California. She is the granddaughter and great-great granddaughter of Caribbean poets and is happy to carry on the family tradition. Her work has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, The Alaska Quarterly Review, Atlanta Review and Lyric as well as a number of other journals and anthologies.

In French

In French, you don’t French kiss.
Instead, you ‘turn a shovel’,
rolling the tongue in the mouth
as though it were a kind of digging

another way of entering the earth
slowly lifting the dampened layers,
turning them, if only to plant, again, desire,

as if, doing this,
you could bury yourself in the body
dig your way into its center
and then deeper still
as if you weren’t in deep enough, already.