"Portrait of Atlantis as a Broken Home" by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend June 25, 2019   Portrait of Atlantis as a Broken Home   Vanessa Angélica Villarreal

I swim down to                look for our four-               chambered house.                             The window               in our room still leaf-               darkened, its bruiselight               charged with fault.  Am I very lonely?               I age in reverse until I am as              small as my child              body, my chest swollen              with bright longing              that the walls will not always              greet each other                             in collapse—   The lord is kind.              The underworld is lit by half                           -moon as if to say, none                           of this is evidence,                           only decay.              In the drift, this wreck still looks like a life:              everything still hanging is relieved              of its weight like an archer's arrow                            suspended in rags                             of snow.              I hunt the me              that made this heavenless night,              my young fear circling your              false beacon, its low              stars and difficult earth stacked              immense against              every fact— I should be funnier here:                             Underwater, iron sinks                                                                             weightless as                       a kite                                       plummeting                        through peaks.            Copyright © 2019 Vanessa Angélica Villarreal. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 25, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets. About This Poem   "I wrote the first version of this poem while living in Colorado in early 2013. Newly married and homesick during an unusually dark and snowy winter, the poems I wrote during this period were affective mappings of the terrain beneath memory, its deeper ruins stored in the body. Like Lorca's idea of the cante jondo, or deep song, 'where the ruins of history, the lyrical fragment eaten by the sand, appear live like the first morning of its life,' this poem is denied a clear narrative and has to dive into the wreck to unearth a more visceral logic from its lyric fragments. Oddly, this poem, among others I wrote during this period, has startled me in its prescience when I come back to revise it—what the body already knows, how a poem's intelligence guides us, early as it can, toward the first morning of a new life." —Vanessa Angelica Villarreal   Vanessa Angélica Villarreal is the author of the poetry collection Beast Meridian (Noemi Press / Akrilica Series, 2017), a recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award and was a 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award finalist. She was born in Rio Grande Valley borderlands and lives in Los Angeles, California. Poetry by Villarreal   Beast Meridian (Noemi Press / Akrilica Series, 2017) "Gacela of the Dark Death" by Federico García Lorca "Diving into the Wreck' by Adrienne Rich "Water Grave" by Mai Der Vang June Guest Editor: Samiya Bashir   Thanks to Samiya Bashir, author of Field Theories (Nightboat Books, 2017), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month's weekdays. Read a Q&A with Bashir about her curatorial approach this month and find out more about our guest editors for the year. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038