March 19, 2024
After a Call With My Mother
The day of the haircut a toad dribbled across
the porch and put me off my porridge.
It hadn’t been spring here
since I was ten. If here is home
then home is damp on a surfer’s lycra,
apology in a glass of orange juice,
red-clay marks on a summer skirt.
I’m positive absence can stop
a season, that nothing is more solemn
than a hair-peppered sink
and hydrangeas are bluer on the phone
because you call them hortensias.
Joana Urtasun is a poet and translator who grew up between the Basque Country and the UK. She recently completed her MFA in Poetry and Literary Translation at Columbia University. Her work has been published in Anthropocene Poetry Journal, Some Kind of Opening and No, Dear Magazine, among others. She is currently based in New York.