Nina C. Peláez

I hold the vacant cradles in my palm:
wax wan-white, honey-drained, ringed
with dirt and gray. I arrange the shells
atop the coffee table’s grain: an atlas
of foreclosure left to empty on the branch.
I think about catastrophe more than poetry.
The colony that fled my neighbor’s keep
leaving behind the flightless brood
and then expiring in the field. The shoddy room
in Lincoln where my mother died, strung out,
with a bullet in her head.

My father does not believe in God or therapists—
instead, he pedals his bike past Brighton Beach
to the Coney Island Y to swim his fifty laps.
Once, I went with him and watched as he emerged
from the locker room in faded swim trunks
moving slowly to the edge of the pool. He paused,
lifting his hands over the gray halo on his chest,
pressing his palms together in a gesture
I know he learned as a boy.