& how the body keeps is a black hole by heidi andrea restrepo
Poetry editor Tuuli Qin-Terrill on today’s poem: This is how it feels to be dropped into the current of a maelstrom thought. “& how the body keeps is a black hole” by heidi andrea restrepo rhodes is a poem that spellbinds the reader with celestial encounters. It is a can of pressurized air, light and heavy all at once, abounding with associative leaps. Yet in its measured frenzy the poem still finds the room to realize “the gravities of matter & mattering.” For a poem of galactic inclusivity, there is a striking figure sitting silent in the middle, an “I” waiting to be uncovered or noticed by the world. We are reminded in our loneliness that there is embracing light in this expanding universe so full of grief, that there is quiet in the exploding debris all around us.
& how the body keeps is a black hole
From Ampersand Organ by heidi andrea restrepo rhodes, Milkweed Editions, 2026.
heidi andrea restrepo rhodes is a queer, non-binary, crip/disabled, brown, writer, artist, scholar, educator, cultural worker and creature of the Colombian diaspora. They are author of The Inheritance of Haunting, Afterlives of Discovery: Speculative Geographies in the Settler Colonial Imaginary, Wayward Creatures, and Ampersand Organ: a more-than-human lyric. They are a professor of feminist, queer, and disability studies; and poetry co-editor at Apogee Journal.
IG: @vessels.we.are
Tuuli Qin-Terrill is a poet, scientist, educator, and Chinese adoptee of the upper midwest. Her work has appeared in The Inflectionist Review, Dunes Review, and Bellingham Review, among others. Currently, she works as a remote biopharmaceutical researcher and is an MFA candidate at Northern Michigan University where she is a poetry editor for Passages North.
