Joan Naviyuk Kane
The light unevenly gray beyond the triple-pane:
maybe neglected, or itself, self-filtering.

Obscuring as it crystals into existence, as it
opaques the hoar on the fence & bract to branch
of all my trees. Our yard, my debt. Unpruned lilac,

two liability spruce to the north, the ostentatious
sprawl of crabapple once fertile next-door—

then storm-felled, now thrust into the yarrow
as it overgrows our bed. A triplet of rowan.

Then sour, then choke-cherry.
Not least, two or five cedar.

Cottonwood & aspen & an alder hell
I squalled predictably into the right-of-way.

A birch I see almost too much to name.
Black spruce, too.

You don't have
a personality disorder,

said she, a good doctor—
but one of three women

of color licensed
to practice psychiatry

in the State of Alaska—
between guffaws. Another

in Fairbanks, & what use
is she to me, so far away,

probably overbooked
& kind enough to do what she would.

To see me as (a) patient, to prescribe
whatever I will take for whatever

she happens to think she might fix or,
for now, temporarily stay. I see the dark

horizon in the west. It rhymes with nothing.

Nothing, you see.
from the book DARK TRAFFIC / University of Pittsburgh Press
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This poem is written from the perspective of a woman who has internalized her husband’s abuse as she tries to resource herself to survive it. Its action (or inaction) takes place on the final solstice they will spend together under the same roof, and the ice fog is both a metaphor and a literal correspondence.

Joan Naviyuk Kane on "I Defer a Second Opinion"
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M. Soledad Caballero on Life in Translation

"Her first poetry collection—I Was a Bell, winner of the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award—explores personal and historical memory and her experiences as an immigrant and cancer survivor....Caballero’s writing is conversational yet lyrical, mixing English and Spanish, its short sentences holding vast amounts of beauty and pain." 

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