Two Poems

“Bourne 1” by Bruce Turk, courtesy of York Kennedy

Talking with My Children About the Afterlife

What can I offer except
my well-worn collection of earthly delights:

say a pocket of bright, perfect-temperature
sun poured through a canopy’s cracks;

say an outdoor nap, an afternoon’s good sleep;
lake-calm raft, the company
of everyone you’ve ever loved at once;

say a buoying; say just enough
breeze stir, leaf sigh;

say endless arpeggio, ascension of greens:
pondwater, bottleglass, parakeet,
honeydew, verdelite, celadon…

say graze just for the touch
of soft muzzle to grass; say Ghibli field,
watercolored motion slowed quarter-time;

 say birdsong, creek trickle, womb shush.

 I love you. What’s comfort enough? Is it
possible God won’t keep us

trapped? Say light can’t but spill back.

Walking Through the Museum, I Write a Letter to My Father

Dear deserter, these dioramas
remind me of you— especially
the dead-eyed, taxidermied shapes

which resemble no one’s idea
of a father.  I would rather not
think of you, but this museum was meant

to reproduce the once-world, evoke a sense
of grief-tinged wonder. I pay
the ticket price beneath a plaque, bronze

paragraph remembering an absent
benefactor. There you are among
the relics, replicas, the plaster-

cast façades, sharp draft straying
through the hall of architecture.
Dear disaster, you look grandeur-less,

a crumbling statue. In another
room, the same five-second clip
repeats— some narrative

malfunctioning. If this is not
a metaphor, what is? I walk
away, think of my hatred of you—

glass-cased though it is. This is where
they keep the arrows— bone, flint, iron-tipped—
each succession sharper. Time-lapsed, life

can still surprise you: a man leaves
the house one morning, stumbles on
an ichthyosaur fossil— stone-pressed,

full of teeth. Is there some rendering
of this where you don’t loom, extinct?
Some visitation when my reflection

doesn’t catch in the elevator cage
and I don’t feel particularly sick
of you? Let me duck

into the pocket dark, the tomblike
gem collection where the quiet rocks
remind me eons of fiascos end

in splendor. For the geologic record, let me
tell you: once you go, you’re gone;
there’s no more time, no room;

what’s left selects its own survival.

About the author

Violeta Garcia-Mendoza is a Spanish-American poet, writer, photographer, and teacher. She is a member of Carlow University’s Madwomen in the Attic Writing Workshops and a reader for Split Rock Review/Press. Her work has appeared in a variety of venues online and in print. Violeta lives with her family in Western Pennsylvania. You can find her online at https://www.violetagarciamendoza.com and on IG @violeta.garcia.mendoza.

About the artist

A professional actor and director, Bruce Turk has maintained a practice of visual art for over 35 years. He studied drawing at Northwestern University, was mentored by Yukio Nishinarita in Japan, and studied painting at the Art Students’ League of New York.