Where I am, it is Texas now,
a constellation
of suns caught in the lemon
tree, no one calls
the monarch butterfly gringo,
dusty sage, eternal
bleed of the salvia as if
something the wind scratched. Time
a communal thing
-amajig. Property. This morning
I stepped on a translucent baby
gecko I injured
fatally. My mother said maybe
it will recover,
set it outside. She
has changed. Forgive me.
In the tender
rain-filled grass, boquet of Angus
calves fluttering their lashes,
they watch my mother
and me pass. Tomorrow
they’ll be meat. But today their ears
twitch in the surprise
of a south-eastern breeze
that, for all
they know, will never end.
Marcela Sulak is the author of Immigrant (Black Lawrence Press) and the chapbook, Of all the things that don’t exist, I love you best. She’s translation three collections of poetry from Bohemia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She directs the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University.