SageGreenJournal.org

voices out of the West, mostly poetry, personal to planetary

Anne Valley-Fox

Santa Fe, New Mexico

Anne Valley-Fox is the author of How Shadows Are Bundled (University of New Mexico Press, 2009), Point of No Return (La Alameda Press, 2006), Fish Drum 15 (Fish Drum Press, 1999) and Sending the Body Out (Zephyr Press, 1986). She published Your Mythic Journey (with Sam Keen, Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1989) and is co-editor of five oral history collections from the New Mexico Federal Writers’ Project (Sunstone Press, 2008-2013).

AnneValleyFox.com.

three 'sonnets' by

Anne Valley-Fox

Nonpartisan

The concubine of the underworld is expecting. Up above, we

hold our breath with shivery fascination. She might deliver at any

time, any place, and in multiples. The instant Ebola pirouettes

west, a state-of-the-art hazard team will rush to the scene—

stifled in moon suits standing back from her sweaty thighs

they’ll watch aghast as the newborn slips from its poisonous

caul into our midst. Though its isolation will be scrupulous,

the medical team will be sweating bullets. Because we are

linked, like paper dolls in a flammable chain of contagion

and death, the virus, a monster of pure chemistry, provokes in me

a feeling almost tender. Unlike the drone, dispatched from a U.S.

Air Force base to take out a terrorist target in Afghanistan,

or the hooded assassin raising his hatchet over a bowed head,

Ebola plays no favorites in her fast embrace.

My Life Is a Circus

My partners and I have stolen three children, intending

to start a circus. The boy is a gifted aerialist, though he’s clumsy

on land. The girl, a gold-metal gymnast, has never flown trapeze.

The four-year-old, brilliant in circus arts, speaks only Chinese;

she’s chubby and snubs what we cook. My partners are

twenty-somethings of the “whatever” ilk. I tell them we really

need a plan. We can’t hold the children captive forever, so

how to convince their parents to send them to our circus?

Also, what acts are we going to offer? We need to establish

a practicescheduleand get started. When do they think we’ll

be readyto openand where can we find a tent? My partners loll

on the floor—“No worries!” The baby has plucked up a centipede

and is avidly chewing. Scooping the leggy remains from her

mouth, I see in a flash the calamitous turn my life has taken.

Reincarnation

Women and girls of the sweeping caste sweepall day—

smoothing the ground around barefoot tailor, naked toddler,

the mendicant’s toes evenly spaced like dormer windows.

They sweep aroundfamilies sleeping on sidewalks,

rolled up in sheets like logson the floor of a forest.

They whisk the walkways with bundled straw, erasing prints

sothat monkey, viper, stinging wasp on the sacred rump

of the cowin the lane may come again as gods. Passing

a mirror I check my reflection, noting potential corrections.

“Comparisons are odious,” my father was wont to say.

Might the sweeper compare her fatewith the garbage sorter?

The builder of funeral pyres?“Love yourself unconditionally,

no matter what,” the dharmateacher instructs. I’ll need

all the lives I have coming.

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