SARA DUDO

WINDOWS

‘There are openings in our lives of which we know nothing’

— Jane Hirshfield

I am mourning the ladybug that has been with us

along route 40 in Vega, Texas clinging to bus visor,

the way it propels itself to wind as we open the double doors

to check brake lights. I cast a frostbitten palm into a dumpster in Fairfax.

I cannot convince myself the window to your suffering is closed,

tulip bulbs wrapping roots around bone plate & wire of vein.

Synonymous with fruit flies always hovering the fruit of our home,

syrups of apple cider vinegar and lime salt, still they return.

Life is not the come and go. Life is sometimes a series a phosphenes:

growing accustomed to seeing light without any light entering the eye.

Other times, my father lies his head against my heart to hear the extra

beat, not knowing what the spare opening of my heart is for:

more room for entering; and I know I could never study it to expertise

so long as I breathe freely. At some point along Santa Rosa outskirts,

tightening of lug nut & spin of tire, a shard of Atlantic sea glass

escapes my pocket & I fear what may enter following its exit:

I once categorized insignificance, but now — every infinitesimal

piece could splinter an ocean into birth, split each peach

in a 100-mile radius at thin pearling skin. In the night,

a cockroach traversed up our drain and circled a porcelain bowl.

I watched its vining legs trying to love a new mountain.

I stand still in front of the window, my heart opening

double speed & before the closing, a single dot of fruit fly

strokes across my vision on its way to the raspberries.

EMERGING

‘So I will remember, remember cicadas in August,

their high whine like a hi-fi, shrill and thin’

— Anne Sexton

Truly, truly I cling to you like the child

lost in Mt Katahdin wilderness finds his way back

following the river down the mountain.

Surely at your roots there must be water

for the cicada in my mind to sip

and go about my thin wiry cry in a high pine.

Last May, some called it an infestation-

Brood X, periodical cicada emerged from the earth

where they fed on sap from tree roots for 17 years.

Just as a dandelion knows when to metamorphose

from flower to fruit to seed, cicada molecular clocks

note passage of years through change of sweet to

bitter sap, as trees live as trees die

it is as you see.

Into the goldenrod fields before the beehives,

you test the earth with a finger, Luna calls

a dandelion a wish flower, surely

everything is nascent —

it will not touch us.

Sara Dudo is a recent MFA graduate from University of Nevada Las Vegas and recent Pushcart Prize nominee. She has had her poetry recently published in The Atlanta Review, Portland Review, Southwest Review, Red Rock Review, Oakland Review, and Tiny Journal. 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 Ray and her dog Layla.