Returning to the Village
Stephanie Niu
That gray hut is where I first learned to swim. They pushed us
through a gap in the floorboards. Dropped down a rope
to hold. It took us several panicked kicks to find

that we knew how to do it. Once under, our eyes adjusted
to the salt's burn and gleam. The fish did not care.
They turned their long bodies and became something's dinner.

At home, toweled off, we ate from plates of tasteless crackers
bought from the only supermarket with sides salt-faded
to white. The woman who owns it still lives inside.

She has no sons; the fish she sells comes frozen
in boxes from the mainland. I once saw her crouch
on the jetty at dawn and place a basket into the water,

raise it again full of leathery fish flopping against her arms.
She gutted them. They were so small. I watched
her toss what was left of them back to the ocean.
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Cecilia Vicuña and Rosa Alcalá
"Singing Poetry with Illustrations: Cecilia Vicuña’s Poetry Performance with Translator Rosa Alcalá"

“In many ways, I see her work as trying to return again and again to that playful, erotic exchange with language and other materials, piecing together the remnants of that original pleasure and hope derived from youthful exploration and collective action with the aftermath of various historical and ecological accidents inflicted upon the U.S. and inflicted by us, an obsidian mirror to the Anthropocene.”

via THE HARVARD CRIMSON
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Cover of Sarah Ghazal Ali's book, Theophanies
What Sparks Poetry:
Sarah Ghazal Ali on Language as Form

"'Matrilineage [Umbilicus]' sprung from this unsettledness, not halfway into my first pregnancy, when my body ceased to be entirely mine. I came to the page eyes closed, hands outstretched to trace the contours of my thinking. I could not yet trace the face of my child, so I tried instead to touch each thought as it was born."
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