Poetry by Sonya Wohletz
Bilirubin
After Luci Tapahonso
1.
My mother sits on the porch in the afternoon sunlight
and opens the top buttons of her cotton blouse
to expose her rind to the sun.
With some effort, she reclines in her chair. A moan escapes
and then settles into the breeze through piñon trees.
I am beside her, like an itch.
My thoughts range the folds of my own flesh
and find no peace.
She raises her slender, yellow hand,
to shade her eyes and gazes at me:
I see it now: there is recognition
in recollection, and the salts pool in the humors
as the body stalls, its rivers dammed.
2.
When the baby is breastfed exclusively
you need to expect jaundice,
because the liver
can’t yet break down
the extra red blood cells.
The skin will
pitch to a new palette,
iodine-like and electric.
And the whites of the eyes
will swerve to a new harmonics.
When they open from sleep,
you will lose yourself
in their opacity and think
back; the errors suddenly evident,
the guilt, firmly established
in warm inks.
Then, the urine darkens. You watch
for signs of dehydration, counting wet diapers.
But the pigments remain, adamant and frightening;
they can endure for months.
3.
For today, at least,
quell your alarm;
the baby is alert, alive.
4.
The mother, on the other hand,
curls away, as within a still life.
You can see the vivid tint of her,
evoke her essence, but her
presence remains in memory,
as albedo.
5.
I brushed your long dark hair
and saw in your eyes, for the first time,
the faint whisperings of your death. When
you asked if I recognized these colors, I couldn’t
distinguish them; my language blocked —beside the tumor,
bloated like a fish in the receding tide,
to which no remedy concedes comfort.
6.
The baby bestows her
first smile (around two months);
share salt with your relatives,
salt and laughter. It irises
the tongue, to have a baby among you.
7.
When the moon rises again
archaic and alone,
how I will know its yellow spectacle
as anything other than illusion;
as atmospheres osmosing a disarray of
sick light; as the sun reporting
its own dying over and over,
to a diorama of rocks and gasses, inert?
8.
There is the familiar song, Juan Luis Guerra,
intonating intoxication: me sube la bilirrubina
cuando te miro y no me miras.
If you move your limbs in a certain way,
maybe you forget them for a while,
maybe you slide between them—
Or, you take the unspoken
lesson from the song:
admit to no symptoms—
no one wants to see the sufferer.
The evidence
stains itself onto the afflicted,
in any case.
9.
Let the moon metabolize these visions—
there is no way
to absolve them otherwise.
10.
That way, the baby will sleep and grow,
immune to the suffering of the dead.
11.
You may find yourself yet
dressing in the skins of
a new life.
As shield, as shroud—
evaporating
in brilliant and dangerous wavelengths,
invisible to the naked eye.
Yıldız/Star
The village suckles
a clay-fattened duct through the forest.
Beneath where it empties out in ruddy mounds,
an animalic sea looms.
And the smoke of burning leaves colors—
the vision, littered
with shell scraps and manure.
In the evening the star wanders the pastures.
Lumbers amidst the houses,
heaving with old masonry and salt.
When I first took
the cow’s udder in my small hands
the milk would not come easily. And yet I
pulled thin streaks of light in the evening sky
while she hummed into her oats.
Another day in the valley, the bell ringing
to signal the homecoming, the papillae pliant.
Above, the old mosque webs itself
into the world with electric cables
and concrete to gird its swelling wattles.
An auntie sweeps the patio and shoes the cats
away; the sun floats like cream,
licks sweet mouthfuls of light
across the breakfast tables and grasses.
In childhood we named them first:
the star, the cow, the glands:
one mute, one mellow, one favored—
Yet, their memory requires
the nourishment of sounds beyond
the hollow bell of the mother
Sonya Wohletz is a writer whose work brings together image, history, and landscapes. Her work has appeared or forthcoming in Latin American Literary Review, Blue Unicorn, Roanoke Review, and others. Her first collection of poetry, One Row After/Bir Sira Sonra, was published by First Matter Press in 2022. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee.
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