Eduardo C. Corral: After Bei Dao/After Jean Valentine
The skin of your deity smells like gasoline
Your prayers are added to the pyre
A gold wheel spinning
Once your voice broke out in a sweat
Each word a salt lick
There are fingers rooting inside a violin
Orchestral maneuvers
In the middle of the pandemic
You mistook a group of ghosts for an orchard
You, coward
Fingers are rooting inside a violin to pull out
The last scraps of birdsong
A gold wheel spinning in your mind
Like insomnia
EDUARDO C. CORRAL’s poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Jubilat, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry. His work has been honored with a “Discovery”/The Nation award and residencies from the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. Slow Lightning, his first book of poems, was selected by Carl Phillips as the 2011 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. He is a recipient of a 2011 Whiting Writers’ Award.
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