Green Linden Press

Kéloїde

“When I stand before thee at the day’s end thou shalt see my scars
and know that I had my wounds and also my healing.”  —Tagore, from “Stray Birds”

Look: anxious badge
bubbling up. Scar

tissue that binds memory to flesh.
See how blood and dirt fused

the bloom. Infection shine
lit the surface

of human water. Birthing
protection. Spalted wood,

splintered home-
grown canoe. Tear

at the scab and
let each tear teach you.

Aaron Coleman is the author of Threat Come Close (Four Way Books, 2018) winner of the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and St. Trigger (Button, 2016), selected by Adrian Matejka for the Button Poetry Chapbook Prize. Aaron is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the J. William Fulbright Program, the Cave Canem Foundation, and the American Literary Translators Association. He has lived and worked with youth in locations including Spain, South Africa, Chicago, St. Louis, and Kalamazoo. His poems and essays have appeared in publications including Boston Review, Callaloo, The New York Times, the Poetry Society of America, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series. After completing his MFA in Poetry and PhD in Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis, he is currently the Postdoctoral Fellow in Critical Translation Studies at the University of Michigan.

ISSN 2472-338X
© 2021