Anna Ojascastro Guzon

NOTES ON EMERGING 

One is thrown into eighteen fathoms, expecting
to steady oneself or graze
a surface underneath yet footing never presents
as an option. For a child, this experience
is, at the least, unraveling. While adults
may marvel: Have I ever known anything?
One feels one’s lungs filling with
something other than air
and different from what should be
mundane. This is when one becomes inhuman
some being that does not live
inside a home, with portraits, desk lamps
an upright piano. One becomes an animal.
One that does not own a thing
and has daydreams of death:
a body pinned, an SUV and sweating
shuddering, even an odor emerging
while every warning ­siren
in one’s vicinity, is resounding.

LOT

It’s arduous work, getting away
not from it all, but from that big lie
that you didn’t foresee, when you
were still acquiring a sense, for concrete
buckling beneath you, beside you and
within the most shaded passes
of your periphery, where edifices
are composed of old­-town building blocks
the kind that upcyclers relieve
from their lot over­ridden by packs
of collared, spayed and left behind by those
who had had enough to roll into
bubble wrap. There’s no room,
they claimed of their ins­-and-­outs.

________________

Anna Ojascastro Guzon is a mother, writer, teacher, and former physician. She is also a co-founder and program director at YourWords STL, a volunteer, tutoring organization in St. Louis. She is a graduate of the New School’s Graduate Writing Program and her work may be found in the Best American Poetry blog, Bone Bouquet, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, among other literary magazines.