Belonging

by Ariel Fábrega

Although we haven’t met,
I dream of the day my heart’s
tired coastline finds your name
washed on the shore
in the foam around scattered shells,

and I will follow the guiding tide
to the great sand dune that
rests between cragged cliffs
I’ve tried to summit on so many
merciless treks.

As salt wind kisses my nose and
my eyelids blink orange in the bright,
I will run into the pillow of sand
to climb my dune,
as open and free as ever I’ve been,

because at long last, I will see you
waiting for me at the top,
shining as sure and sweet
as the sunset over
the western horizon.

For She Who Could Not Speak Enough

I.
For she who was my ancestor,
my great-grandmother’s grandmother,
or her mother before her,
or the daughters who followed –

she who took the plight of men,
to harvest, carry, and accept without a word.

II.
In my wrist’s bouquet of veins,
my blood swells like the rivers she wades to fetch his water.

In the wrinkles of my palms,
is a field where she wields a blade, and sugarcane leaves glisten with beads of sweat raining from her trembling lips.

In the marrow of my elbow bone,
throb vestiges of bruises from when he wrenched
her scorched body to her clean swept floor.

In the lines around my eyes,
she cradles a baby daughter,
their bodies merging like their fate, as one crouched in their tawny shelter.

Rage must have struck her then,
and taut as the pause between lightning and thunder,
my ancestor gasped its echo and shook to withhold it.

Yet she imprinted on her daughter the flash and weight
of unspoken words as bitter bridles of womanhood.

III.
Now when men claim the right to my existence,
I promise to be the last bound daughter and
to raise my voice over their whole world.

A flash of gold flickers in my brown iris.
In me, deeper than the wildest crevasse in the earth’s most hidden valley,
I feel a rumble.

So I cut the bindings of a hundred ancestors
and my lungs fill with their pressure
when I say:
“Enough.”

Unwelcome Miner

I didn’t know my heart locked joy in a stone cavern
until grief spalled it with an iron pickaxe,

and the metallic tapping was so sharp
it throbbed in the nerves beneath my teeth
and caused my spine to buckle.

I wish I’d been a little softer,
open to absorbing memories of my lost one
through my skin until they circulated in my blood,
becoming part of me.

Instead, I hoarded exalted moments
in my heart’s dark cave
as protected crystals,
never to touch or visit.

Then grief came to mine
by tapping,
tapping with the iron blade until my stone cracked into an avalanche,
exposing my treasure for excavation.

The crashing stone keeps ringing in my ears,
I’m still wheezing from the dust.

I’ve crumbled,
yes,
yet also
softened.

Midnight Homage to Wallace Stevens’s Blackbird

I.
Sometimes, I slide into my insulated boots,
and when desert rain mists on my cheeks,
I dream of the Arctic tundra.
There where the sun shines at midnight,
dwell those who know true cold.

II.
I remember
when he said he’d find me
after the bar,
so I’d watch the clock.
If his beer-soaked knocks pounded
too far into the wrong side of midnight,
no one could save my soul
from his splinters.

III.
A hare hops through a street lamp’s ambit,
unaware of coyotes slinking
in the midnight shadows.

IV.
My bloodshot eyes widen.
What have I forgotten?
At midnight,
drops of water from a leaking faucet
flood my ear drums,
and I toss to staunch the din.

V.
Dimes in a wishing fountain
become an unfulfilled galaxy
when the midnight
moon gleams.

BIO

Ariel Fábrega is a writer, poet, and painter based in Arizona. After academic pursuits in medicine, psychology, and finance, she connected to her creative ambition to write poetry and fiction. She is currently working on her debut novel.