CYANOTYPE WITH LINOLEUM BLOCK PRINT
When I think of you, the black
ink always gets on my hands.
Some things we understand
before we’ve ever touched them.
The cabinets of rice and mulberry paper,
the silver type in the long drawers,
the million tiny seasons in California,
deep blue sinks, the print changing
in the sun. With the morning
there is little to do. There is a fog bow
haloing this view, a controlled burn
in the eucalyptus forest, a flood
in the chicory pastures that could never
move you to cry. But I could try
to carve your likeness in a woodblock,
the hard, missed lines a pressed
eyelash on the page. I wish we had
slept on the mountain, kept the flutes
of cholla, the crowned pods of gone
poppies. I lose the light through them,
the shadows they would have made.
Jennifer Valdies is a writer and visual artist from California currently studying poetry at UMass Amherst's MFA for Poets & Writers. With Allie McKean & Hunter Larson, she edits Little Mirror Magazine, a critical archive & biannual magazine of poetry. Her work can be found in the tiny, Annulet: a journal of poetics, and elsewhere.
