Sara Lupita Olivares
you can see only the shape of the red-billed pigeon
in the bathroom window, opaqueness
a distance the yard

repeats. the moon sinks—its
persistence a syllable swelling
through the day.

a child draws worry as a river,
its stones neatly pressed to one side.
when we take a photograph of the landscape

we find ghosts of trees in ways dimming
around themselves to create
indentations of other selves.

I come home and empty out someone else’s
drawers. the blurriness of
trees deepens, though the periphery remains

pointed as if to highlight, interiority being
a complicated resolve. the red-billed
pigeon halfway hatched from its egg

its shell a root taken from
a landscape and turned upside
down, our own want left to

unplace its things within idled
forms. you can hear a singing still before
opening—the self quietly separated from its own sound.
from the book MIGRATORY SOUNDS / University of Arkansas Press
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Throughout this poem, I was exploring lines between the past and the physicality of the present, seeing how images and sounds accumulate and intersect. In this layering and associative movement, the poem works to convey what is personally and generationally held and passed along, with the echoing and resurfacing that can occur. What becomes unseen is still heard and sensed showing how reality, memory, and the invisible at times feel interchangeable.
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