harvest

i brace her leaves upward / weeping ritual / what others sense as earthen rot / filth from afterlife / is production / she sniffs land with bees & critters / gathering round our hunger 

like a halo / worship how sacral / she ages out / body araneidum / as oncidium / oceanic blood / bloom cycle / together we un-branch / harvest as much lightning / our wails can muster /

electric nectar sucked / from those devastating years of industrious / complexities i shelter / tucking into a crocus / repair comes little / by little rage 

                     uninterrupted canopy / amber withholds bone / i flower/ 
                     bighara / mayari  / nabu / flicker in approval / lower goddess / 
                     sun bitter spells / repeat thrice / their charmed childhood names / 

                     to onlookers we seem / specters / spectacles / glamorous 
                     deviancy / low creeping crabgrass / but ask any blazing 
                     celestial / who know us / hunting as harriers / above the 
                     wretched bombing

Copyright © 2024 by Angela Peñaredondo. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 7, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets. 

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“Writing is my way of conjuring queer deities and personal mythologies. It is part of my creative work, which is dense with nature but also deeply dystopian. Writing holds me when I am overwhelmed by grief and anger. I find that, in my conjurings, I cannot separate that imagined world from the one we live in now——its constant state of emergency, gendered violence, and war intertwined with a natural world in crisis. My mythmaking becomes urgent, dreams affected by geopolitics, and the deities that reside there cannot see it in any other way.”
—Angela Peñaredondo