ｂ𝒶ｂƳ ғẸ𝓿εℝ

You’re as pretty as you are serious, he told me as he wrapped his hands around the nape, his knuckles all rough and tumble from the wood and dust. The instructions were unclear; I figured by the time the baby came I would have it all figured out, that I wouldn’t feel the thrum of my own heartbeat on the roof, like it was slowly caving. It feels so right, like I’ve known him forever, our lonely eyes finding each other in every room, rusted bookshelves and their commentators, irked professors and armchairs. We would embrace each other at night and draw smiley faces on the baby’s feet with felt tip markers, and the roof would stop shaking and the clouds stop tumbling. Where are we, anyway? I take his hand like a child; every day I wake a little bit more than the last. I think about how girls say this is it, and it is. When I stopped going to classes the world kept spinning in its own lovely orbit, my fingers getting fatter and my dreams rougher. I stop listening to the clouds telling me that this is all there is, the dream, a little corner of my bookcase, a nail from the crib I found on the bathroom tile. At the grocery store today I nearly fell in love again when the wind changed direction, the redwood trees parting for the professor, kind and absent in the eyes. Where have we gone, now? The months slow like torture, my heart thrumming through the roof again, parts amiss that I find around the house, in my sleep. In my perfect home, the refrigerator is full of my favorite yogurt, topped with strawberries and sugar, my baby’s room full of tools and drivel. The professor tells me I have the eyes of a priestess, that I should know better, where he stands from the doorway. And he worries, worries, worries when he finds the shrapnel and the moldy nails, the parts of the roof that have gone up in smoke. The women in the grocery store stop by with baskets, I wear the perfect dresses and hide the shrapnel and present myself to them, a darling, a vision in pink, and how lucky is it for a girl to find something like this so young? When I wake in the sky I scream, the roof keeping me stable gone, the clouds scrambling to look for me, the cries of the baby already near. The professor starts to scold me, what a silly girl, he says, and her silly mistake. Marrying a man I don’t know, but how scary can he be, really? Is he not the one for me? Can you not know someone when you feel it in your beaten down heart, his eyes finding yours in only a few moments, sealing your heart after one day?

Lana Valdez is a poetess and filmmaker currently based in NYC. Her 2024 debut poetry collection, “I Rot,” is available via Filthy Loot, and her other work can be found in Spectra, Expat, Exotika, and others.