Emerging BIWOC Poet Spotlight
This monthly series features poems by women of color in the early stages of their publishing careers. It is our intention to create more space at Perugia for the work of poets who are Black, Indigenous, and women of color (BIWOC). We hope using our platform to celebrate this work will expand the readership of the poets we spotlight. This series aligns with Perugia’s mission to support and promote emerging women poets; featured poems will be from poets with no more than one published full-length collection. We’d love to hear from readers with suggestions for poems & poets to feature.
February 2021 Poet: Rage Hezekiah
OUR BIKE TRIP
Some farmers we met invited us to their wedding, halfway through Washington State. Like sisters, we pulled borrowed dresses over our heads, paisley and cotton, revealing feral underarms. We bartended drunk in an open field beneath Cassiopeia, passed a full flask of bourbon between us behind the bar— Barefoot we ran through black woods to drag the keg from creek, waded too deep, soaking our skirts, reckless and wet. At night's end we found men to kiss— I grabbed an older teacher with a full head of curls and led him behind the red barn, ran my fingers through his ringlets and wished he was a woman. While you found a boy barely of age and brought him back to our shared bedroom. Men are so simple we didn’t know we could have been kissing each other.
Source
Stray Harbor, Finishing Line Press, 2019
Poet bio
Rage Hezekiah is a New England based poet and educator, who earned her MFA from Emerson College. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, MacDowell, and The Ragdale Foundation, and is a recipient of the Saint Botolph Foundation’s Emerging Artists Award. Her chapbook Unslakable (Paper Nautilus Press) is a 2018 Vella Chapbook Award Winner. Stray Harbor (Finishing Line Press, 2019) is her debut full-length collection of poems. Rage’s poems have appeared in The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, The Cincinnati Review, ZYZZYVA, and several other journals and anthologies.