Josefa Segovia was tried, convicted & hanged on July 5, 1851, in Downieville, California, for killing an Anglo miner, a man who the day before had assaulted her.
Are the knees & elbows
the first knots
the dead untie?
I swing from a rope
lashed
to a beam. Some men
along the Yuba river
toss coins
into the doubling water.
Visible skin.
Memorable hair.
Imagine: coal, plow,
rust, century.
All layers
of the same palabra.
Once
I mistook a peach pit
on a white dish
for a thumbprint.
Wolf counselor.
Reaper.
Small rock.
The knot just under
my right ear
whispers God is gracious,
God will
increase. The soul,
like semen,
escapes
the body
swiftly.
Added: Monday, July 14, 2014 / From "Slow Lightning" (Yale University Press, 2012). Used with permission.
Photo by: JW Stovall
Eduardo C. Corral is a CantoMundo fellow. His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2012, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Quarterly West. His work has been honored with a "Discovery"/The Nation Award, the J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize from Poetry, and writing residencies to the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. He has served as the Olive B. O'Connor Fellow in Creative Writing at Colgate University and as the Philip Roth Resident in Creative Writing at Bucknell University. Slow Lightning, his first book of poems, won the 2011 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. The recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, he currently lives in New York City.
