Home (Exercise)
by Julia Guez
Never mind words like sad or orange. Say nothing about a close call (or calls).
Ignore words like if, then, or ever.
Notice how she moves through the kitchen,
the sleeves of a pin-striped shirt rolled up to her elbows, hair
swept off her neck, a glass of wine on the counter.
Describe the color in the glass without using the words citrus or stag,
Dire or the fall upstate around Hillsdale. Say nothing about a hospital (or hospitals).
Describe the color in the glass without using the words
sunset or sunrise. When you hear The Firebird Suite, Dind your feet–
really just two shoes full of sakura–in bloom on the stair,
blossoms big and bright blooming all the way up
to see your sons asleep in the bluest most beautiful blankets
each of them holding a little red horse in his hands.
If your eyes begin to well like the last
two oysters on a tray when the ice they sit on, the lemon and the mignonette
Dill with feeling the half-shells
linger on what’s blurring and why. No more hydrangeas, though. Not a word about
Paradiso.
No need to be gaudy now.
Julia Guez is a writer and translator based in Houston. Four Way Books published her first and second collections of poetry In an Invisible Glass Case Which Is Also a Frame (2019) and The Certain Body (2022). Her work has also appeared in American Poetry Review, POETRY, The Guardian, PEN Poetry Series, The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, Iterant, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Guez is currently working on a novel about a disappearing house. She’s writing poems all about horses, suns and at least one canal. And she’s translating La Mano Suicida by the Costa Rican poet, María Montero. You can learn more about her work and workshops online at www.juliaguez.net.