Two Poems

Self-Portrait as Revision                     

I am the storm-torn palm frond draped on the balcony wall.
I am the cumin in the soup stirring the lentil’s sleep.

I am the olive’s skeletal pit, the cat’s paw, the thistle spear.
The clay in the kiln cast into a small flask to hold centuries of musk.

For weeks I do not sing, though I gush, an underground rill carving blindly to the sea.
I succumb to thunder, the urchin’s sting, the softness of moss. This is my prayer.

I am driftwood—parched in white heat, soaked in January rain.
A seashell pressed to its pale grave.

The wind rises, rewriting the hymnals of dunes.
I am hurricaned. Worn smooth again.

To the One We Lost

child    when the blue-black sac of you    dropped
   a yolk of matted cells     and plasma     into the toilet’s

white womb     i blamed the rain     the fried eggplant
   the trip to the mall              blamed my past selfish ways

faulted the oak       that fell across        our fence
   while you        sailed off       my second       my spawn

little prawn     i never met      peaceful
   you floated                   from your watery cave

to the salty grottos                 of the sea
   where perhaps     a spiny anemone        caught you

in its tentacles      a coral bed       your cradle
   and the manatee moaned           a mournful song

_________

Angela Narciso Torres is the author of Blood Orange (Willow Books Poetry Prize). Her work appears or is forthcoming in POETRY, Cortland Review Quarterly West, Bellingham Review, and Missouri Review. A graduate of Warren Wilson’s MFA program and Harvard Graduate School of Education, Angela has received fellowships from Bread Loaf and Ragdale Foundation. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Manila, she is a senior/reviews editor for RHINO and a reader for New England Review.