Hymn, Then
after Jammie Holmes
It is the please, George.
As in, asking these in-
tolerable things to be
other than what
they have always been
and but politely.
Inside the throat,
a hymn then
one May when
the sun refused
to shine on
the final please
hanging above the city
for all to see
the certain body
gathering force in-
struments of war,
weather—heat now
rain—hate, even
a plague cannot contain.
Julia Guez is a writer and translator based in Brooklyn. Her essays, interviews, poems and translations have appeared in Guernica, POETRY, The Guardian, Adroit and BOMB. Four Way Books released her first full-length collection, In An Invisible Glass Case Which Is Also A Frame, in 2019. Her next book, The Certain Body, will appear in 2022.