July Westhale
We all feel like magical realism.
As if we may ascend, like Remedios Moscote.
Maybe we haven’t fathers to show us something pedestrian,
like ice. Nor the trajectory of a firing squad. We at least
have environmental determinism.
We’ve droughted, o how
we’ve parched. Gasped. Whooped and hollered
for fate to darken the door, the welcome mat
with snakes, the don’t-tread-on-me.
What do we know of climate change, really? Or, for that
matter, fog around Old Priest Grade, like lace?
Like very old lace. Like lace made carefully,
then stored carelessly. Lace as holey as theories of history.
Or God. During the drought—anytime
before the Internet—Teresa of Avila came to me
in dreams. Above me like someone gutting a trout
with the wrong knife, but still
with deftness and speed. Saint John got
the story wrong. O Johnny Angel.
The fog slow-dances with the stocking sloughs—what
hubris, to make salmon or trout, without something to butter up.
Teresa approaches me these days like a lover
who already knows her body’s cosmos
and my worldliness. She moves more succinctly, efficiently.
Without ceremony. I’d like to say I feel graced.
I do not. Only more poignantly attuned to things
I cannot do, mantels I do not possess: gracing
a presence, holding a baby, healing the sick, mending fabric. Martyrdom.
July Westhale is the award-winning author of Trailer Trash (selected for the 2016 Kore Press Book Prize), The Cavalcade, and Occasionally Accurate Science. Her most recent poetry can be found in The National Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, CALYX, Rappahannock Review, Tupelo Quarterly, RHINO, Lunch Ticket, and Quarterly West. Her essays have been nominated for Best American Essays and have appeared in McSweeney’s, Autostraddle, and The Huffington Post. She is the 2018 University of Arizona Poetry Center Fellow. www.julywesthale.com
