Ja’net Danielo

This body I have tried to write,

this betrayal, to trace its roots in my blood,
through the labyrinth of my mother’s
genome. And I have tried to write myself
into memory, traverse its dark gray terrain
to find myself again. To classify my grief.
Call it fish, thread a needle, stitch the label
into its fat greasy scales. To write my cousin’s
cancer into a beautiful life, a horse running
on shattered ankle, striking white of bone
fragments in dirt. I’ve tried to turn bad cells
to ghosts, starve them of milk & honey
offerings of myself. And capture butterflies
like in that sixth-grade science project, how I
took scissors to the Audubon Guide, how precise
the curve of my hand as I made my way
around their wings. How I mounted their
bodies, contained them, pressed glass against
burnt siennas, icy blues. How I named them:
swallowtail, red admiral, mourning cloak. An exercise
in precision, I thought it would always be
that way—clean white space, a place for each
gold-winged thing: which beast carried poison,
what beauty could kill, & which rose from the two
wild daffodils in my childhood yard into the sky
like a black-flecked flame ready to burn
anything in its path.

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Ja'net Danielo is the author of The Song of Our Disappearing, a winner of the Paper Nautilus 2020 Debut Series Chapbook Contest. Her poems have appeared in GASHER, Mid-American Review, Radar Poetry, Gulf Stream, Frontier Poetry and elsewhere. Originally from Queens, NY, Ja'net teaches at Cerritos College and lives in Long Beach, CA with her husband and her dog. You can find her at www.jdanielo.com.