Stage Directions for Embrace
Nina C. Peláez | Poetry
Your body is a stone at the bottom of a pool. Your mother a limb
fallen atop the water.
Evening approaches as the music begins: wood shaking
and singing with the hair of the animals.
Birds call from branches that have yet to fall.
The music grows and grows.
A dog cries, rushing toward the birds.
Your body is a stone shaped by the water.
The dog listens for the tree frogs hiding beneath the stones.
The birds listen for the crickets hiding beneath the fallen limbs.
The dog picks up the stone in its black mouth; drops it
on your mother’s chest. Crickets sing where the bodies touch.
Your body is quiet. The water listens.
Now, your mother’s body is a bridge into the pool.
The dog crosses first, then the birds, then the frogs,
then the crickets: one after the other, each returning to the water.
Evening falls but the water keeps shaping the stones. The music ends
but the animals continue singing: mouths open at the bottom of the pool.
Nina C. Peláez is a poet, educator, and cultural producer based in Maui, Hawaii. She recently received her MFA in Poetry from Bennington College and is the Associate Director of The Merwin Conservancy. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Narrative, Electric Literature, Rattle, Pleiades, swamp pink, RHINO, Radar, The Baltimore Review, and elsewhere. She is a 2024 AWP Writer to Writer mentee and was recently awarded The Coniston Prize in Poetry and a Key West Literary Seminars Workshop Fellowship. She is working on the manuscript for her first poetry collection.
www.ninapelaez.com