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.