Welcome back for Zoeglossia’s Poem of the Week series curated this month by Kay Ulanday Barrett.
May 3, 2021
Audio
To the Boy Who Walks Backwards Everywhere He Goes
By Ina Cariño
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To the Boy Who Walks Backwards Everywhere He Goes
By Ina Cariño
Photo description: Their right arm is propped forward with their hand next to their face, and their left arm crosses their chest. The lighting is multicolored, with shades of red, purple, pink, blue, and green softly casting shadows on their brown skin. They have a tattoo on their left shoulder and a ring piercing on their bottom lip, and they wear a silver dagger earring on their left ear.
Bio: Ina Cariño is a Filipinx American poet with an MFA in creative writing from North Carolina State University. Their poetry appears in Apogee, Wildness, Waxwing, New England Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. Ina is a Kundiman fellow, a Best of the Net finalist, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and a recipient of a fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. They are the winner of the 2021 Alice James Award for their manuscript Feast, forthcoming from Alice James Books in March 2023. In December of 2019, Ina founded a reading series, Indigena Collective, centering marginalized creatives in the community.