VALERIE DUFF
BIOME
There was a blue drink on the porch sill at the Black Whale
and it was summer.
So many things show up on tests.
This is how we live, adjusting odds, percentages
in our favor. Still I sweated in a hot back room
with windows seamed shut
googling survive googling fear googling possibility
the WiFi ghosting. Never death never radial
symmetry or prime mover. Meanwhile outside,
bumper cars and sand toys nested
in the oyster grass. Island birds pieced
their nothing songs from soft white sand
and little tar
not far from Three Mile Island
against the tide, the guard who held me upside down
for fun when I was five.
How close lifeguard
to diagnostic tool. I never felt the thing,
the jelly luminescent in my breast. Its Medusa stalks
a wave of supplication, umbrella pulse of dreams.
REPORT
Oh, honey,
the unspoken life of the body
and the world in which we drink
tea and eat the ruby
seeds that doom us half to hell.
To be so scared
when considering
the afterlife in the sentinel
pot where tea may steep too long.
A riverbed of tannin coats
the way a specimen lines a dish.
The body, its margin
assessment, has forgotten where it came from,
a snow-capped mountain that’s left
its origins behind, strata
too deep to feel, layered up
to melting ice. Its axillary
may one day give way
to a deluge that will hide
the dye stained earth, simply
spun to a surface of water,
a change so gradual
most don’t feel the slipping
of the shoreline until core
markers are submerged, until
all systems are undone. Because invasion
history of dragon fire
yields satellites
that wink and spread across the galaxy
leaving only vapors of ourselves,
prognostic rolls of the dice,
the wheel spins to reassess
when a medieval fortune teller
with the tarot comes to evaluate
the fireworks display.
All has turned to ash, to sack.
Only skin remains,
a cloak that lived the lie so long:
cutaneous tissue with no diagnostic abnormality.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Valerie Duff’s second book, Aquamarine (Lily Poetry Review Books), will be published in September 2023. Her first book, To the New World (Salmon Poetry), was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize from Queens University, Belfast in 2011. She has held fellowships from the VCCA and Writers’ Room of Boston. She is currently working in Donor Relations and Stewardship at MIT and is reviews editor at Salamander.