Poet Jasmine V. Bailey was born in Al-Khobar, Saudi Arabia and raised in New Jersey. A graduate of George School and Colgate University, she traveled to Argentina on a Fulbright grant before receiving her MFA in poetry at the University of Virginia. She lives in Charlottesville.

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Because I want to know how many ways there are
for you to name my hair, because I want to see if I
can see it growing through your fingers, because it was
a dogwood whose petals and red seeds and gray leaves
and voice of my grandmother brought the first poetry
to me, and because the only thing I believe in is that
there is a place where those poems still exist, and we
can walk there, we can take my life like a bridge there,
and the words will come back to me with the noir films
of our finished evenings, ...

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