VANESSA ANGELICA VILLARREAL

I Appear to Myself in a Corn Tortilla

when I am       pregnant and     starving
at six am,    preparing       an egg
or two       at the warm black iron     I think  
of the hen        of the pale       taupe
shell     so easy to        crack     the warm yolk
ever suspended     like a sun     in its center

and my heart      my womb     too suspended   
in the center    of my body     I am a symmetry
of lifting       between my hips      the baby    
afloat     as if     by magic     and so    I crack
the egg         and contemplate     my holiness  
flip the tortilla      and in the air          it stays

Scorpion

you are already
            some bright cold go

but the road
            is a diamond cord

longing, & amazed I
            am stung pale light

the distance plain
            loaded saturn trample

my stone this sadder body

Unspooled Tide

In fire, we discover our human parts: hooves split into toes then fuse again, hair unravels from buffalo heads, bristled fur recedes, regrows in the dark. We scarcely remember our flesh forms, or recognize our ownership.

To find the original light is to find the source body. In albedo, we ache toward the firs. We run toward utter dark.

The water wall topples over, crashing down on us in long, foamy loops, as if it were hair tumbling down the canyon’s great white shoulders.

 

Vanessa Angelica Villarreal's work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Poetry Foundation Harriet blog, The Feminist Wire, Caketrain, DIAGRAM, The Western Humanities Review, NANO Fiction, The Colorado Review Online, and elsewhere. She is a CantoMundo Fellow and her book, BEAST MERIDIAN, was a finalist at Nightboat, Futurepoem, Saturnalia, and Willow Books, and is forthcoming from Noemi Press in 2017. Her hometown is Houston, Texas.