Wave, Form
Balanchine Shiva, from
one lithe silhouette countless
arms emerge. They
perform, troupe aligned
third position dead center,
orchestral fanning, each
pair of arms revealing
what arms might be. Snaps
the alligator. Crane’s
wing rising fluid in the blue
hippodrome, collapsing in plié
to be again. Possibility is one
fleshy fire.
In the vacant
atrium, sounds
of street-machines beyond
the flautist’s
trill—silk transparent
over taut muscles. You
have no one
to pursue
now that life is over.
You meet everyone’s eye.
Gabriela Valencia is a poet and non-fiction writer. She was a recipient of a 2022 Robert Pinsky Global Travel Fellowship; longlisted for the 2023 Peter Porter Poetry Prize; and named an Honorable Mention for the 2022 San Miguel Writers’ Conference Writing Contest. Her poetry and essays have been published in Watershed Review, Degenerate Art Literary Journal, Great Lakes Review, Runestone, The Showbear Family Circus, and elsewhere. She is also the co-author of neuroscience research in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research; and Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience. She received her Bachelor’s in Chemistry and English from Loyola University Chicago in 2018; and received her MFA in Poetry from Boston University in 2022, where she served as Teaching Fellow. She lives here and there with her partner Josh and his two herding dogs, Rainer and Zola. https://gabrielavalencia.net/
the poet's billow 