Crown Shyness
Val Dering Rojas
You do things like take a bit of dusk for sun,
a slice of blue for constellation.
A year of months in a grove of willow,
a body that is an arch–
–not to say I was a bridge, just always
in two places at once.
And how do we reconcile these margins?
It’s easy to see the mosaic when looking up,
the branches that grow apart,
the divergence they leave for light–
but what informs the mirror-image
except dirt? There’s a point where the body
begins to swerve toward stop living like this
just to veer away from stop living.
When I finally saw the entirety of sky, I demanded
the clouds and the birds,
all of the cosmos, every quasar,
the moon.
Val Dering Rojas was born and raised in Los Angeles, and currently lives in Oregon. She has also studied Addiction and Recover Counseling and Psychology. Her work has appeared in SWWIM, Right Hand Pointing, The Rumpus, and Pirene’s Fountain among others. She is the author of the chapbooks TEN (Dancing Girl Press, 2014) and WASPFISH (Glass Lyre Press, 2016), a finalist for the Glass Lyre Press Kithara Prize.
Originally published in Moss: Volume Eight.
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