Roxi's Corner:
A Poem by Roxi Power
What if the atmosphere is all the ancestors
of all time reaching out to us through wind?
So the small new branches of the plum tree
brush our faces. The brook song enters
our minds like a lullaby.
And what if it’s not.
What if the Buddha head–no, wait.
I’m calling it the Buddha head too soon–
projecting ideas about who I want to be–
the me who is not a “me,” who goes
for refuge each day to become one
on behalf of all transmigratory beings.
Laugh at that if you will (sometimes I do).
I should have said–what if the Aztec Warrior
head is really a Buddha. The one I bought
for my parents in the Yucatan during my
drunken high school trip. The decapitated
head that has been staring at me since Mom’s
death, the one I finally banished to the ground
outside, turned its face outward to the creek
so it wouldn’t stare through the window
at our days. It could bring bad luck
and sudden violence–the kind I attributed
to him, her husband, whose name I still
can’t inscribe here for fear that,
like the warrior head, he’d return
through such symbols. Gather a presence
like a curse to all who didn’t love him
for who he was–a wrathful man.
And now, I see the killer as a Buddha.
And am I allowed to. Would that change
everything from the beginning of our time
until now, purifying a stream of war,
beginningless and endless–or softening
the dark clay with one drop of regard,
one teardrop from your torrent
of forgiveness, rushing from an unseen
river cleansing us all, singing the song
that objects would if we bestowed
them with such tune.
For this issue, Contributing Editor, Roxi Power, shares one of her recent poems.
Roxi Power is a poet, performer, and publisher. The Songs That Objects Would Sing was published in 2023. She co-edited Winter in America (Again: Poets Respond to 2024 Election (Carbonation Press, 2025) and founded the trans-genre anthology series, Viz. Inter-Arts, at the University of California, Santa Cruz where she teaches. Roxi podcasts for The Hive Poetry Collective on KSQD, Santa Cruz and performs Live Film Narration (“Neo-Benshi”) around the country. She received an AWP Intro Award and has been published in American Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, Puerto del Sol, Seneca Review. Her MFA in Poetry is from Cornell University.