Winter in my Belly

The scientist fed me a salad of geranium leaves

A winter kind, tipped white. Two stones flung skyward

Crowned in more stone. Me wondering if a mountain is

Silent inside. Every campfire makes me lonely.

I bite down bread & cold weather. Slice my finger against

A glass bottle. The red so red & bright I could not help

But admire. I am but next door to happiness. Blood

Beating against a blue bandana. Remembering my uncle

Across the lunchtime table in Las Vegas sharing labor stories;

A man falls forward from his own cement roller and is crushed,

Slowly crushed, in a cartoon it would be funny, you could almost

Picture the pancake body peeling up flat on the roller,

But this is not funny, it’s death. Feet first, my uncle says.

He’s already been crying. I want to say the story is a lie, something

Terrible I made up to sadden my poem about a single drop of blood

Beading garnet on my index finger. A poem that headed too

Artfully in the direction of mountain & pine, a cement roller wheeled

In like a death derby. Nearly all my father’s friends are dead.

In Copenhagen I hid when I saw army trucks rolling through, who even

Fears the army when the army lives in Copenhagen? The trucks were

Topped with hand-bound Christmas trees. I saw the soldiers with their guns

Strolling beside the calmest, Copenhageniest, swan-scattered lake. It

Reminded me of sitting next to my uncle at the restaurant table, knowing

He was strapped with a gun, a gun in Las Vegas, the shining Mandalay Bay

Hotels like gilded macaroons. It felt wrongful, that gun, like a stiff dick,

Like the steel hand of a chiming slot. The cocktail girls dressed like Santa,

Like sexy Santa, their perfect legs wrapped in support hose, their eyeliner

Like the curved runner of a Norwegian sleigh. Copenhagen is just another

Stupid name for sleep.

Emily Vizzo is a writer and educator. She previously covered Congress for the Scripps Howard News Service in Washington, D.C., and has written about topics including the biotech industry, corporate social justice, surf, the arts, education, business, and health. Her essay, “A Personal History of Dirt,” was honored as a notable essay in Best American Essays 2013, and she was selected for inclusion within Best New Poets 2015. Her first book of poetry, Giantess, is available from YesYes Books, and she has a novel in progress.

Emily actively volunteers to support environmental protections for California’s Central Coast, and serves as Artist in Residence for the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, an independent research affiliate of the University of California, Santa Barbara. A 2018 Coastal Fund grant recipient, her workshops link scientists, artists, and community members through writing. She was recently voted to the Executive Committee for the Surfrider Foundation Santa Barbara Chapter.