Liv Mammone

cantfindit

Liv Mammone is an editor and a poet from Long Island, New York. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Wicked Banshee, The Medical Journal of Australia, and other publications. In 2017, Mammone competed in the Union Square Slam as the first disabled woman on a New York national poetry slam team. She was also a finalist in the Capturing Fire National Poetry Slam in 2017. A 2016 Brooklyn Poets Fellow and Zoeglossia fellow, she works as an editor at Game Over Books. In 2022, hers was one of the top ten most read poems at Split This Rock’s The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database. Source

Fear

If the pain doesn’t come back, 

what will I write about? Will the poems 

have tendon and teeth? I didn’t get 

right the sonnet of all its colors.

I did not find the exact dagger of phrase 

about the long loss of my life.

 

Hope is all I do and am. 

I don’t think I’m poet enough 

to make you taste this mango; 

or see that sutured sunset unless 

from a hospital bed. 

I was good for carving. 

 

There will be kisses, music, street names. 

Loved ones will go where the gone do. 

What if I don’t want to (write it: can’t) 

write about these things. 

What if I would rather feel 

than create feeling? 

What then? Go ahead.

 

Published:

2024

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2025

Themes:

Ars Poetica

Body & Body Image

Disability

Doubt & Fear

Faith & Hope

Health & Illness

Literary Devices:

Anaphora

a figure of speech in which words repeat at the beginning of successive clauses, phrases, or sentences

Asyndeton

the absence of a conjunction (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so…) between phrases and within a sentence

Hypophora

a figure of speech wherein a writer raises a question and then immediately answers it

Interrupted Clause

a word group (a statement, question, or exclamation) that interrupts the flow of a sentence and is usually set off by commas, dashes, or parentheses

Rhetorical Question

a question asked for effect, not necessarily to be answered

Sensory Detail

words used to invoke the five senses (vision, hearing, taste, touch, smell)