Cristi Donoso

Phonology

When I bare you my body
I am not

afraid. You have touched
every word I know
Held each phoneme—as if it may break
in your hand
Traced the shape of my sounds with your fingertips
and clutched them
in your mouth
Consume
every cadence
my tongue will draw.

I still want
you
here.

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Cristi Donoso is an Ecuadorian American writer whose work has been published by The Threepenny Review, The Cincinnati Review miCRo series, PANK, Lake Effect, Catapult and others. She was a 2021-2022 PEN/Faulkner Writer in Residence and a 2022 Best of the Net finalist. Her first collection of poetry was a finalist for the Andrés Montoya Prize at University of Notre Dame Press. Born in Quito, she lives outside Washington, DC.