Predictions of the Material
Before the wick rejects
the flame; before the glass salts
the waters, or the rental en route
to your funeral stalls, I worry
the dog isn’t getting enough sun,
& it is midnight but we step out
anyway onto summer’s chow
tongue. Clouds extend the glare
of lightning far off. Before phlox
heads drop, the dog sinks
the anthill gathered full & quick
at the ceiba’s trunk. Nothing swarms
his leg or the river he pisses
into the heart like a god, no arthropod
island, no insect bridge of grappled
spurs. Before sunrise, I turn
a burner high in anticipation, olive oil
dollop ready to smother the pan,
when a moth plummets to the blushing
element. Wings immediately
charred. Let me tell you,
more than once in a parked car
I’ve held the searing buckle
to my chest—before drivethrus,
before driveways, drivel down
philtrum; before the beach, crushing
indistinguishable mounds
in bare feet, a horse conch’s crown
tearing skin. Even anaphora
can’t coax the future. You said, Ay mija,
are you crying again? before dusk
revealed the hook in the pelican’s beak.
Copyright © 2020 by Jessica Guzman. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 29, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I was writing poems about losing my father and kept returning to a moment in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude where the characters interpret the state of objects around them as ‘predictions of the material.’ After my father’s death, it felt like every tangible object—animate and inanimate—offered predictions I disregarded. This poem emerged from a meditation on that feeling, as well as an interest in how anaphora both reveals and conceals what we remember.”
—Jessica Guzman
Jessica Guzman
Jessica Guzman is the author of Adelante (Switchback Books, 2020), winner of the 2019 Gatewood Prize. She lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.