Grisel Y. Acosta

Dr. Grisel Y. Acosta (she/they) is a professor at CUNY-BCC. Their poetry book, Things to Pack on the Way to Everywhere, is available from Get Fresh Books. She is editor of Latina Outsiders (Routledge, 2019), Creative Writing Editor at Chicana/Latina Studies Journal, and a new Poetry Editor at WSQ Journal.

There is No Still Life: A Burning Haibun

I am haunted. Lily pads float like suspended Pac-men in a liquid sky looking for a power pill. Sun wields a fierce Exacto blade on the surface of water, an overexposed saber threatening to kill a glowing koi that swims like a tangerine fantasma. Lines of reflection copying foliage from beyond, distort and squiggle, zigzagging pond surface, a cool contrast, green so bright it is practically yellow, pool so deep and murky it is a charred ochre. All this captured as still life but…. One second later, every pad will create a different configuration, the crimson will be out of sight, the sun’s spear will point elsewhere, the temperature of a hot day hitting cold water will change in micro-degrees no one will notice. A worm will be eaten at the muddy bottom, a spider will land on a leaf, a tadpole will squirm and its movement will cause an unseen ripple, a bird will fly overhead and settle on a nearby tree of leaves that cascade to the water’s edge. What else hasn’t been captured in the tableaux? Freshwater amoeba wriggling in circles, the chirring of nearby crickets, a cat falling asleep on a stone, a dragonfly wing catching a sunray, a bead of sweat on a photographer’s forehead, a caterpillar munching holes into greenery wet with dew, winds making old wood branches dance, a writer giggling while passing by and seeing too little. The koi fish didn’t agree to stopping time this way and it cannot possibly know how much I enjoy seeing it glow like this, translucent and powerful, jetting through the deep for sheer joy of movement, or maybe out of hunger, swishing toward a tiny, mushy thing it plans to gulp down. Or perhaps it’s rushing toward a hidden nook I’ll never see, or it could be playing with friends who didn’t photobomb the portrait. 

I think I’m in love with a ghost. Swimming in water is freedom to me, but maybe this fish is old and tired and moving slowly and who am I to assume, to superimpose, youth and quickness, to roughly quote Bad Brains? Maybe this fish doesn’t exist, is blowing bubbles from the nothingness. Maybe the koi never wanted to grow old and die and its myth will forever wander the pond of its youth, forever create a streak of melon and purple that will disappear as quickly as it appears. Perhaps it follows me, tells me one day I, too, will be legend gliding through the ancient dancefloors that once saw me on the regular, a streak of red there then not there and there again, forever in motion, forever slipping into darkness.