VIOLETA GARCIA-MENDOZA

Ode to Fog

Call it the end of the world, come alive—
by which I mean how the past 

keeps dissolving…its counterfacts infinite 
possible rooms. I am indoors, sitting at the piano,

hands branching a chord I have not yet 
played. These are the slow blinks, seconds

before the song begins, when I listen & think and if?
In every multiverse, do we linger 

like this? You are upstairs, still sleeping 
& outside the world is that charged kind

of quiet—incense, smoke, sigh— barely 
solid & I am still silent, staring off.

Blame the fog. In another life, I might 
have been the veil scraping against

the corners of a sooted city or the slice
of lamplight or the galloping black.

Or is it all pentimento? Painting over painting 
over painting, repenting. Even now

I might play anything, press my bare foot
to the pedal’s brass, let sostenuto 

palimpsest every note together, at once.

Long into Your Drive, the Sunrise Briefly Casts a Goldspell

after Jane Haskell’s Yaddo (1964)

These seconds are the kind of painting 
you can only perceive bleary, wheat fields blurred 
by high-speed, distance. The landscape gone 
gold, the way you used to picture it: egg yolk,
amber, honeycomb… that is, once-you, the figment

thick with wistfulness. Maybe motion

is a kind of wisdom—wind-swept
where the spirit splits its cage of bones;
even now, a charm of sunlit finches
lifting. Forgive me, hopelessness
is a room I’ve had to bless & burn.

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.