SOLASTALGIA NOCTURNE
It’s late spring & earlier I overfilled the bird feeders
while thinking about karma, anticipating hungry
wildlife, insomnia. Each night’s its own soft throat
& lying awake I distract myself from past selves
by playing catch & release with Ring doorbell alerts.
In the driveway: deer, red fox, raccoons
slipping between arborvitae & basketball hoop.
In the distance, lightning ironworks the sky:
decades of rooflines, centuries of oaks. Everything
is temporary is a kind of curse where existence stirs
like weather, where survival plots in terms of forage,
tunnel, shelter. These hours, I’m sorry to be human
with our trademark cornering factors; I know
every apology creates its own future problems.
The night animals feed, then pixelate
back into the screen’s consolation wild.
ABOUT THE POET
Violeta Garcia-Mendoza is a Spanish-American poet, teacher, and suburban
wildlife photographer. Her poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals,
and in 2022, she received a grant from the Sustainable Arts Foundation. She is
a member of the Madwomen in the Attic Writing Workshops at Carlow
University. Violeta lives with her husband, teenage children, and pack of rescue
dogs on a small-certified wildlife habitat in western Pennsylvania. Songs for the
Land-Bound is her debut collection, out from June Road Press in 2024. VioletaGarciaMendoza.com
ABOUT SUGAR HOUSE REVIEW
We loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), and we want an
opportunity to better hear our contributors. We're featuring audio recordings of
poems from our pages, read by the poet. This an open invitation to all contributors
from any of our issues, we were delighted to print your work, now we’re eager to
hear it.
No comments:
Post a Comment