Anca Vlasopolos

Diagnostic Terms

“murmur” sweet sound seeming to say
something like mama a brook splashing gayly over small stones

more accurately I’m told
“turbulence of the blood” ah not so soothing

that one I buy not that I want it but that I know it
water kept back let loose from locks

ships wanting passage
gate keeper working gears portals

does not water seek its own level
does it not in great floods rip open paltry bounds

for now doctor says nothing to worry about
merely blood boiling over

valves the movable ends worn out
stiff from years and years of use

opened systole diastole
filling the chamber giving way to the flow

not so quick to close
turbulence for now a small spill how soon a flood

and why not?
valves annealed to keep the main chamber from cracking

how many times the wayward child how often my lost ones lost causes
knocking their leaden hulls against these portals

while chamber fills and fills and fills to overflow
with blood

Las Novias del sol

wing bent

that’s how she broke through her jade pendant

filigreed with silver veins

she fell among dead leaves dry grasses

my clumsy tries at rescue

at o (i thought) so gently righting her wing

setting her o (i thought) so gently

on palm of milkweed leaf

hoping a bit of rest more sun would heal

but this bride of our refulgent star moved her long legs

fell to the ground again

could not climb up the thin twig o (i thought) so gently offered her

that was the last

last monarch to struggle her way from her green womb

first under my eye unable to ride the breeze

for three years now i watch the milkweeds flower

put forth their stunner perfume

cover clusters with seven kinds of bees

monarchs come in the afterbloom

float by one two perhaps a season

stop to sip nectar of other flowers no more lay eggs

was it those balmy august’s ends so very long ago

when my machine with its steel grill

carried like tiny mastheads glowing veils of corpses

was it my clumsy touch a giant’s mauling

is it all our crimes

piled upon these tough fragile sails

these brides of light are said to lead us to that translucent portal

between life and death

where those we lost we may o briefly touch again

those veils we tear that portal we batter down

so we are left to yearn

but no more move between

BIO

Anca Vlasopolos published the short-story collection The Invisible Daughter and Other Alien Encounters; the award-winning novel The New Bedford Samurai; the award-winning memoir No Return Address: A Memoir of Displacement; six collections of poems: Late Pearlescence, Fires in the Dark, Often Fanged Light, Cartographies of Scale (and Wing), Walking Toward Solstice, and Penguins in a Warming World; three poetry chapbooks, a detective novel, Missing Members, and over three hundred poems and short stories in literary journals.