Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: The incantatory tone of this poem wowed me when I first read it; I admire how that tone is woven from rich images, often from natural settings (“the flowering-pear phalanx” and “huckleberry mouth,” for example). The syntactical ambiguities propel the poem forward, and the poem addresses its title subject obliquely yet profoundly, the repetition of “ray” and “remission” calling up the experience of radiation in particular. Dudo covers an amazing amount of ground in just eighteen lines.
To hear Sara read the poem, click below:
Remission
ray the bird in you the jade in you the try in you
ray the wren you watched from child window ray
the flowering-pear phalanx on Main rounding the haste
in you ray your voice ray locked in pink brine
ray crystallizing the caramel ray rust water and freeze
ray the green grass not green land dry dirt desert landscape
in you ray the thin hair too thin for your thickness ray
ray the plucking huckleberry mouth invite the pies Mary baked
ray the name belongs to you, brown moonrays thousand knive
an orange creek a secret bridge herring run ray a thickness
to reach in to pinch fish at midnight with a hand ray
rays hand an old church two hands makes a cathedral
rays Holy Thursday candlelight puncture choral mouth
ray the sound of your body dodging bees congregation
around purple rhododendron bloom ray the sound
of love waiting on brick porch barrier island
Italian pancakes a nose full of salt a rose bush
somehow stays alive ray.
Sara Dudo is a recent MFA graduate from University of Nevada, Las Vegas and a recent Pushcart Prize nominee. She has had her poetry published recently in Atlanta Review, Portland Review, Southwest Review, Red Rock Review, Oakland Review, and Tiny Journal, and has two poems forthcoming in the Idaho Review. Sara enjoys exploring the intersections of the body and landscape, and how illness shapes and redefines relationships. When she is not writing, she enjoys exploring the desert, road-tripping, surfing, and spending time with her husband and her dog.
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