The Stony Lake
or the way I named my silver whip of a son Bảo Đại
half-joke, half-history, my mother’s
smile curving around Vietnam’s wayward son—
hiding glamorously in France while his
country writhed against a static sea, a
romance to be so unapologetically rove, to
say nothing of poetic justice, or the time
my white grandfather asked us children why we
didn’t have our father’s blue eyes— four
fawns quietly awaiting our meal of violence—
I was genuinely curious, too, about biology
and our place in the matter which felt
like a hollow
about mongoloid: a word
that sounded like a broken bird in flight
so terrible and magnificent and magnificent
today is another stony lake and my sister
cannot get out of bed I am the mother to a blue-
eyed child this is not a metaphor or any
other consolation, find yourself an
itinerary for undoing, Reader, for hiding in
plain sight, for impurity rearing its
unbleached sightline against shingle there—
right at the base I said look right
at the foundation of your first-born home
half-joke, half-history, my mother’s
smile curving around Vietnam’s wayward son—
hiding glamorously in France while his
country writhed against a static sea, a
romance to be so unapologetically rove, to
say nothing of poetic justice, or the time
my white grandfather asked us children why we
didn’t have our father’s blue eyes— four
fawns quietly awaiting our meal of violence—
I was genuinely curious, too, about biology
and our place in the matter which felt
like a hollow
about mongoloid: a word
that sounded like a broken bird in flight
so terrible and magnificent and magnificent
today is another stony lake and my sister
cannot get out of bed I am the mother to a blue-
eyed child this is not a metaphor or any
other consolation, find yourself an
itinerary for undoing, Reader, for hiding in
plain sight, for impurity rearing its
unbleached sightline against shingle there—
right at the base I said look right
at the foundation of your first-born home
Jessica Q. Stark is a poet and educator living in Jacksonville, Florida. Her first full-length poetry collection, Savage Pageant, was published by Birds, LLC in March 2020 and was named one of the "Best Poetry Books of 2020" in the Boston Globe and in Hyperallergic. She is the author of four poetry chapbooks, including most recently INNANET (The Offending Adam). Her poems have appeared in Pleiades, Poetry Daily, Carolina Quarterly, wildness, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Hobart Pulp, Glass Poetry Journal, and others. She is Poetry Editor for AGNI and the Comics Editor for Honey Literary. She teaches writing at the University of North Florida.
Art: Molly Dunham