Que Sea Cigüeña, or 😂 😂 🌊
At the end of the world my father texts me, a screen on a screen.
Video of his bedroom lit by CNN. The doomsday clock reads seconds
till the end. A woman in the corner speaking over footage of a nuclear blast.
How long has it been the new year? I mind
distinctions, my father says, Porque estudias la lingüística.
Siempre una vergüenza o la otra. Like Janus, central is the ears, but I begin by looking
for the eyes above the words. Sin ambigüedad, where the vowels
keep parallel. Unlike the totality of guerra, where the hollow ü is lost
like water from a dog’s open cheeks. How much desagüe contains.
Sounding so of the water yet meaning the opposite
—to be rid of it.
Meanwhile in Mexico a silver spotted fish
washes ashore on El Quemado beach. Oarfish, the sliding scale
of doom. The weight of a family put together times the length of time.
It is said to be omen, agüero, of earthquakes, tsunamis. The sign
only signifies the sea, but I’m paused for lo que sea.
Without season, my father brings the garden inside.
Texts a video of wide windows from within.
Sun green laureled white blossoms
skewed iridescent by a flared lens.
Light through layer upon layer
tears light itself apart.
Good night, he texts again. Though we are far from night.
Good night? I try to clarify in return.
Good morning, he says —que sea cigüeña flying over sea—
with two laughing faces:
Gabriela Valencia is a poet and essayist. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Image Journal, Waxwing, The Los Angeles Review, Watershed Review, Volume, and Great Lakes Review among others. A 2024 Tin House Alum, her writing was named finalist for the 2024 Orison Books Best Spiritual Literature Award in Nonfiction and the 2023 CRAFT Hybrid Writing Contest, as well as longlisted for the 2023 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. She received her MFA in Poetry from Boston University, where she was named a Robert Pinsky Global Fellow.
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