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This dark is the same dark as when you close

your eyes I whisper to our son while he

catches his breath. It is well past midnight

and he will not describe the face of what

he fights to unsee. By his feet, the green

glow of a nightlight retreats into blue,

slips softly to red. Above his bed: notes

we once had time to tape onto the latch

of his lunchbox, flights of origami

swans, throwing stars and fortune tellers. When

          your turn comes to lie beside him, this is

the bridge he’s set to repeat: Always an

          angel, never a god—and so you hold

him close like a saint shadowed by the axe,

          cradling her own haloed head in her hands.

R. A. Villanueva is the author of Reliquaria (University of Nebraska Press, 2014).

About R. A. Villanueva

Themes

Form

About this Poem

“As a kind of force field against bedtime fears, my children have taken to listening to short playlists or single tracks on loop while they fall asleep. What promises comfort goes through waves: there were weeks of Diary of a Wimpy Kid audiobooks mixed with Mozart’s ‘Gran Partita,’ nights and nights and nights of ‘Revival’ by Gregory Porter cross-fading into Bluey’s opening-theme melodica. Last summer, when nightmares and nerves felt impossible to bear alone, my wife and I would move between rooms, singing. This sonnet ends with lines from ‘Not Strong Enough’ by the band boygenius; it ends believing that we will give our lives for those we love.”
—R. A. Villanueva

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Annus Mirabilis

           For X.


From the shallows our son watches me play 
dead. He sits on river rocks chucking sand, 
burying strawberries while I float down-
stream, breath wound bright in the gut, a body

both here and of other waters. The day
he was born, midwives touched your face, your hands, 
tested nerve and pulse, dripped saline along
your thigh, numbered blades—their ceremony

for the first cuts, before swaddling blankets,
fever syrups, bath time and mud.

R. A. Villanueva

2018

When Doves

At the columbarium dug
by hand, a man points to where rock
doves would be brought to nest, their eggs

tended by priests, and the cave locked
at sundown, guarded by hired
knives. The flock meant meat for the dry

times; saltpeter; yolks needed to bind
portraits to walls, to raise a sky
gilded with violets and myrrh.

Tonight, my mother paints her nails
black—a shade she names, “Dark Matter.”
She numbers what’s left of her cells,

tells us of this burning inside
her knees, laughs a promise to fight.

R. A. Villanueva

2016

Archipelagic

Not vinegar. Not acid. Not
sugarcane pressed to mortar by
fist, but salt: salt, the home taste; salt,
the tide; salt, the blood. Not Holy

Ghost, but a saint of coral come
to life in the night crossing a
field of brambles and thorns, the camps
of pirates beat back to the bay

with hornets. Not Santo Niño.
And not a belt of storms, but this:
girls singing, an avocado
in each open palm, courting doves;

a moth drawn to the light of our
room you take to be your father.

R. A. Villanueva

2014

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This dark is the same dark as when you close

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