Dismantled Abecedarian with Las Mañanitas and Minimal Pairs

Another day. Another year. Another box of green pears my father buys, in bulk, because they were on sale. Another year in the barrel of a country-shaped gun. Another second opinion on my addiction to sun. Estas son las mañanitas que cantaba el rey David. Deer in twos like rhyming couplets, ears like maple seed wings. Another poem as apology for linguistic sleight of hand. I grieve my every simile before it even ends. Another three-thirty alarm clock. Another mountain hike—to climb out of my body and back into my life. The smell of stream and juniper. A run through the holler. In verse, I know, means morning song, I hear little tomorrows. Medication warning: treats the symptoms, not the cause. This year, I want a poem where the gun doesn’t go off. Another poem that wants to be both a question and a prayer. Another nightmare in Spanish: I even dream in errors. My recent fixation are meanings hitched on just one sound—like canto & llanto or brown & drown. My sister has been adding names to her list of future cats. See how present perfect tense is always slightly in the past? My mother uses an app to match calls to their birds. She takes it to her mother’s garden. She makes daughter into verb. On the back of a receipt, on the refrigerator door: oriole, house sparrow, yellow warbler. Poem as taxonomy. Poem as X-acto knife. Cutting out these images, holding them to light. Ya los pajarillos cantan, la luna ya se metió. Sliced pear, ziplocked on the counter—my name on a sticky note.

Sophie is from Colorado. She is the recipient of a Fulbright award to Mexico. Her writing has received fellowships / support from The Kenyon Review, Brooklyn Poets, and The Porch. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Shō Poetry Journal, Salt Hill, Grist, wildness, Tupelo Quarterly, Thrush, Rattle online, and The Nashville Review, among others. She was the 2023 first prize winner of the Vanderbilt Project on Unity and Democracy Poetry Prize. She lives in East Nashville, TN, where she is in graduate school to become a speech-language pathologist. Language is her day job, her pastime, and her passion.