Julia Guez’s poetry, essays and translations have appeared in POETRY, PEN Poetry Series, The Guardian, Circumference, The Brooklyn Rail, and Boston Review. Guez works at Teach For America-New York and lives in Greenpoint and online @G_U_E_Z. She teaches creative writing at Rutgers University.
One of Several Plots Against Our Lamblike Son or Daughter
Evensong
One of Several Plots Against Our Lamblike Son or Daughter
Born wearing only an amulet, a talisman they take by force, foreshadowing. Even here, hands empty and odd how sickly without being specific you long for a makeshift return to wombwater. Instead they give you a glarebox— the opposite of Mother, if there is one. They take your wings. Then they take your shield. Claim, Both are vestigial anyway. Claim, Both belong to the shears. This is all part of a dream, of course, recurring and also a parable. We will be asked to pretend many things.
Evensong
I Benumbing but not exactly Ativan (Greek for to quiet the noisome drone here and there of the qualms, my very own empire of regret not wanting to amass more of itself and at that, failing). II The Atlantic vain with stars and what of its song? The so on and so forth of a new etcetera, flux of sea- faring elements – how they loll, the vespered sails at nighttime, a model. III The moon too, and its effects and the lights across the gulf, a slow color. The evening palms’ view on to the river dwindling downhill out of habit more than anything else. What it has done to bridges before not what it is doing now. IV Ora et labora they say and I am listening still. What, in the end, the slenderest hands will carry the hours soon reveal. Among other things, a vast array of antidotes, no two the same: camphor, mostly, quietude, or to begin again, the nightly weightlessness. V The ocean indifferent to all of this willing onward – one concavity after another, endlessly inflecting a small part of sadly patterns aren’t predictive or enduring and they certainly aren’t magical much as the human eye may wish to believe in some kind of continuing, a very modern expectation to persist and, perhaps, enjoy the circadian, painful as it might be to feel completely.
