and turn flesh
showgirls into
fresh snowgirls.
I’m curious
about what
slips between
the cracks,
the way an r
stretches its
alveolar
possibilities.
In f-r-e-s-h–
the h bows out
of her imposed
uvular silence,
becomes nasal
instead. A naked
limb of light reveals
less than intended:
the unfeasibility
of semantics,
the sign a tongue
twisting waste of
numbed symbols.
When the ballerina
hears the first notes
of Swan Lake,
her wrists, frozen
by a terminal
illness, circle
up and up, more
cygnet that swan.
Away from the lake
and the promise of
silence, they fly
in unison.
Contributor Notes
Leonora Simonovis is a bilingual poet who grew up near Caracas, Venezuela and currently lives in San Diego, CA where she teaches Latin American literature and creative writing at the University of San Diego. She is a VONA (Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation) fellow, has an MFA from Antioch University, Los Angeles, and is a contributing editor for Drizzle Review, as well as an Associate Editor for Poets Reading the News for the Spring of 2021. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming from Gargoyle Magazine, Diode Poetry Journal, The Rumpus, Arkansas International, Inverted Syntax, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal, among others. She was recently featured in CIACLA's (Contemporary Irish Arts Center, Los Angeles) 'I Traveled West. Poets on Place and Belonging' and in the University of San Diego series on Revolutionary Womxn. Her poetry manuscript Study of the Raft is the winner of the 2021 Colorado Prize for Poetry and will be published in November.
