Empty Mirror

a literary magazine

  • About
    • About Empty Mirror
    • Get in Touch
    • Support EM
    • Colophon
  • Submit
  • Contributors
  • Essays
  • On Literature
  • Poetry
  • Reviews
  • Art
  • Interviews
  • Beat
    • Beat Generation
    • Ted Joans Lives!
  • +
    • Fiction
    • Music & Film
    • News
    • On Writing
    • Book Collecting

Two poems by Emily Vizzo

Emily Vizzo

riversound / credit: de
riversound / credit: de

Toward Openness

Bound in red fir, the fragrant breath of a Central Valley
As they say breadbasket, an open data,

Bound in headwaters, the Mokelumne, the San Joaquin.
The bottomlands. Eggs from the fairy shrimp deep in the mud waiting for rain.

Above a raptor. Below three remnants of a songbird, a Flower Pot map,
A Toolbox quadrant, a tundra swan. One measurement of quinine. Coding

In panic. Men in black suits. Palms on the wall. Oysters in the aftermath.
Sugarcane. A baseball field. A citizen of science. Women in black

Suits riding toward a summer wedding, an astronomer counting
Fingers, and I am in in a pink flowered robe and the window is open,

You’ll be all right in a minute, Audrey Hepburn says.

What then? A foreign city outside.
Railroads. And I am tired of walls.

Tempering, Harmonizing: A Musing on Native Data

One island trench neck and neck with the rain, a delicate

Blue dress borrowed from existing data, buried in white sugar,

Numeral grip, the first place I loved the earthly things, three

Parachutes opening in an ambulance of data. November

Storm breaking over my head in a room where no nature

Takes place. Butter in your coffee. Lavender and thyme

Wishing at the window. Basil, borage. The day a stone boat.

Songs, but of an ordinary, military kind. Some solution pulling

Me at the hair. Brushing my eyelids with angelica florets, effervescent

Data. Suckle, labiate. The pretty pink ring. Saucerless, a charm

Spelled in violet ink. Love of hunger is the first love.

I prick my solution’s palm with cloves. The morning

A botany pressing a cold spoon to my neck.

I am told a good way to begin hunger is to begin with

The mouth.

Share on TwitterShare on Facebook

Emily Vizzo

Emily Vizzo is the author of Giantess (YesYes Books). A National Geographic Educator and former Artist in Residence with the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, she was a recent panelist at the Nobel Prize Teacher Summit in Stockholm, Sweden and is translating from Italian. She served on the Executive Committee in Santa Barbara for the Surfrider Foundation to help protect the coastline and ocean for California’s Central Coast. Her free, public science and creative writing workshops received a 2018 Coastal Fund grant through the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Author: Emily Vizzo Tags: poetry Category: Poetry July 3, 2020

You might also like:

loam / d.enck
Two poems by Ojo Taiye
tree of love
Three poems by J. David
Burma. Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/focusc/6511325865
Three poems from Burma
Stack - D. Raphael
Magic – Amy Fusselman

Comments

  1. Emily Moon says

    February 12, 2021 at 4:36 pm

    Dear Emily,

    I’m so glad I was privileged to read your work. I love your language, the science threaded through.

    I really love what I read, just purchased your book.

    Best Regards,

    Emily Moon

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

I accept the Privacy Policy

 

DONATE TO BLACK LIVES MATTER

BLACK LIVES MATTER

The EM newsletter

Receive fresh poetry, reviews, essays, art, and literary news every Wednesday!


Empty Mirror

Established in 2000 and edited by Denise Enck, Empty Mirror is an online literary magazine that publishes new work each Friday.

Each week EM features several poems each by one or two poets; reviews; critical essays; visual art; and personal essays.

Subscribe Submissions Support

Recent features

  • My Father’s Map
  • On Waiting
  • Seeing Las Meninas in Madrid, 1994
  • Visual poems from 23 Bodhisattvas by Chris Stephenson
  • Historical Punctum: Reading Natasha Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia and Native Guard Through the Lens of Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida
  • Panic In The Rear-View Mirror: Exploring The Work of Richard Siken and Ann Gale
  • “Art has side effects,” I said.

Books

Biblio
© 2000–2023 D. Enck / Empty Mirror.
Copyright of all content remains with its authors.
Privacy Policy · Privacy Tools · FTC disclosures