I was an Affiliated Fellow of the Academy of American Poets during my time at Civitella; I was granted my fellowship as part of a first book award. Many of the fellows selected for the residency through the nomination process are further along in their careers, with multiple books or a substantial, prolific body of work, so I was deeply humbled to be seen as worthy. The space between a first book and a second book can be both tenuous and generative, and my time at Civitella was exactly what I needed to nurture that space. I will never forget the dawn light over the pomegranate trees, the fields of fireflies like grounded stars on one of my first walks to Castrabecco. In the books I read, the conversations I had, in the walks and runs and slow garden mornings, I sowed many seeds. I found many beginnings. I reconnected with myself after my first year of motherhood. This is the space I was in: a space of beginning. I opened toward the possibility of new work, just like all those sunflowers that gradually opened their faces from June to July. All the work I create from this point forward will owe a great deal to my time at Civitella.
Sonnet to Sleep Paralysis
after John Keats
It began for us, hushed, that year. You and I insisted
on seeing each other then sat slack with the unsayable.
Retreat to separate apartments, mirror our way across
rooms, night birds singing as the world folded itself
and stained us like two halves of a Rorschach. When
we woke we were not butterflies, not people. Only
the center of a cleaving. Mine was an old woman in
the corner: Bisabuela, I was sure. Would she leave me
alone, please, out of love? Knitting dread, yours against
your chest, a saddled demon barreling black. This is the
language our minds create when we hold everything
back. Identical vaults. You need each other, the
phantom says. Que no se les olvide, says Bisabuela
through the transparency of her head.
