10th Annual Juried Reading: Joanne Diaz

10th Annual Juried Reading Finalist

Joanne Diaz -- Third Place

These are poems of formal sophistication and finely modulated emotional impact. Their wisdom is both historical and familial, equally at home reflecting on Lorca's Spain, colonial America, and a mother preparing a tortilla at the stove, "slicing each potato thin enough/ to see the light pass through its meat." Rhetorically diverse and intellectually exacting, Joanne Diaz is a gifted poet deserving recognition.
-- Campbell McGrath

Joanne Diaz is a graduate of the NYU graduate creative writing program, where she was a New York Times Foundation Fellow. Her work is published or forthcoming in Grand Street, Notre Dame Review, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review and Quarterly West. She is currently pursuing her PhD in English at Northwestern University.

My Mother's Tortilla

She slices each potato thin enough
to see the light pass through its meat. The oil
in the skillet heats until its scent
rises in a spool of smoke. I watch
her knuckles as she grasps the spatula,
pours the beaten eggs over each slice,
then later, sweeps along the oily edge
as the tortilla blossoms in the pan.
Beyond her, the kitchen's heat dissolves
the latticework of frost that webs each pane
of glass. The branches crisp beneath the ice;
we hear the crackle, wait until their fall.
My mother inhales deeply, leans her hip
into the oven's edge. She refuses help,
her arm's skin waving like a curtain
after a long play. A few strong bones
hold her in one place - the rest are like
light spirits, growing rare and thin in air.
How long until she vanishes, until
the pinkish-white of each bone's glow becomes
Venetian glass, then chipped mosaic, then
the dust that rises from Assyrian walls? Her spine
marks the question; she offers me a slice.