Ananda Lima
Amblyopia
I learned to delight in gifts of myopia
the smudged edges of buildings in the distance
glass freeing itself from thinning outlines
the peach pink sky blended with its reflection
so cute how I never know where I am
tilting my head twisting my map to match
the names the grid I contain in my squint
how I hold a pen to tell what’s right
how I guess from the phantoms what is left
I could laugh: the faint lavender fragrance
my condition a pastel tinged party trick
watch me get lost in my vapor watch me
get by until it thickens into clouds
condenses down into my son’s eyes
Reversal
I crack my dark ls frozen into us
in the misguided hardness of my red
rounded lips and swallow it back into
the inside of my mouth where it should stand
tall and liquid on my tongue like a ti-
-dal wave olh’a onda I’d learned to love
the dizzying spin of my confusion
the forever toddling steps of my mis-
-ty misshapen voice I’d learned to live with
but now I am pushed onto undoing
the transparent surface of my frazil
and teach my son to decode what we can
grab through our faulty filters what we can
see in this crooked world through sheets of ice
Ananda Lima reads “Amblyopia”
Ananda Lima reads “Reversal”
Ananda Lima’s work has appeared or is upcoming in The American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review Online, Gulf Coast, The Common, Poet Lore, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. Her poetry collection Mother/land (forthcoming, Black Lawrence Press, 2021) won the 2020 Hudson Prize. She is also the author of the chapbooks Translation (Paper Nautilus, 2019, winner of the Vella Prize), Amblyopia (forthcoming, Bull City Press – INCH Series, 2020), and Tropicália (forthcoming, 2021, winner of the Newfound Prose Prize). She has an MA in Linguistics from UCLA and an MFA in Creative Writing in Fiction from Rutgers University, Newark.