two poems /violeta garcia-mendoza

Anthropocene Aubade

with line borrowed from Amazon box packaging

Morning again & again the weeping angle of the light threatens to level me. I lie here, scan

the ceiling, calibrating in the graying.

The day new & what’s survived? My phone

is the first thing I touch; only the faintest recognition in my scroll & double tap. Every image: light:

starlings, selfies, sinkholes . . . grief like muscle memory—time-accordioned,

infinite, attentive (like God, though I aphase

hallow & hollow far too much, & lately

only absence catches.) The crows, the garbage trucks, the day’s electric hum begun. Another day awake, alive

& what more would it take to make me love this world, box doubled as last-minute diorama?

I mean, love it like an amnesiac; love even its sorrow-widening light.

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Ecopoem with Comparatives

after Catherine Wing’s “The Darker Sooner”

& then the winter rivered harder, higher, while we called the darkening weather, watched the water— waded through its tides of dread; dreamed dimmer, duller. We creatured faster, fevered in the anti-quietude; plucked the feathered remnants of our birds of dazzle. Wonder-drowned,

we faded further, ashed our days to afters.

Admit it— we endeared disaster, dared it closer, closer everywhere, we kept our nearer angels wasting brighter, louder.

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Violeta Garcia-Mendoza is a Spanish-American poet, writer, and photographer. She is a member of Carlow University’s Madwomen in the Attic Writing Workshops. Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and for Best of the Net, and has won a Sustainable Arts Foundation grant. Violeta lives with her family in western Pennsylvania.