Spring Day
By Sara Dudo
Waking
A goldenrod
in my eye. I rely
on bad math
and the momenta
of planes downhill
toward our arroyo.
Can you feel this heat
transfer?
Breakfast
Blue palo verde glitters
in western wind, slowly births
yellow-flowered fruit, soon
to orbit our dancing
devils. Lemon bars, later, fasting
the day after a man has died
by gunshot and I’m alone.
Answer my collarbone with your
collarbone.
Walking
Desert undertow.
Arborists worry about the trees
not getting enough light
in our missed canopy places.
Meanwhile, walking the cienaga,
I make a note to ask you
how the trees look from above,
how they look in the long
curving rain shadow.
I make a note
on the uses of shelter,
the uses of God.
Afternoon
Spring at the preserve
shatters a dry world: torrential
of yellow slipper, pink yarrow,
sunset globemallow.
In the museum,
my fingers glide fossilized
impressions of magnolia
and its witness, a replica
of a wooly mammoth skeleton
found in a playa.
Large, flat expanse of earth
covered by thick layer of salt
left by evaporated saline ponds.
We are the salt of the earth,
can you not taste it?
Night and Sleep
Lights anoint pale
purple skies with mercury
entangled in nimbus.
My eyes follow the silver glint
the wings a flying ant paint
in near balcony dark.
My after-listening
steadies: in the sound
of I-15 and dune crickets
I wait until I am so still
I can hear the erosion
through me.
Sara Dudo is the Associate Editor for Palette Poetry, an adjunct professor at Stockton University and Rowan University, and a recent MFA graduate from University of Nevada Las Vegas. She has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets. She also received the International Merit Award in the Atlanta Review 2024 International Poetry Competition, and was a finalist in the 2024 Iowa Review Award in Poetry. Her work has recently been published in The Iowa Review, The Minnesota Review, The Atlanta Review, The Cincinnati Review, and The Notre Dame Review, and she has work forthcoming in Oxford Poetry, Denver Quarterly, and Poetry Online. She currently lives in New Jersey with her husband.
Instagram: @saraferndudo | Website: saradudo.com