Turtle Meditations
We are not the family we were meant to be
scatter-cracked by a war that flooded our days
with tides of bombs, massacres, and exile.
Generations have carried the turtle
from house to house and set her to tend the garden.
Before I was born, my cousin painted her
red, the smudge of color a name
a way to say mine.
La tortuga disappears into the binding
tangle of vines that rim the garden.
She is our captive and our friend, the way
everything doubles in this tiny country
where memory hangs bloody
on laundry lines all the secrets
in plain sight, ready to be forgotten.
A great sleepiness comes over me
when I enter the family house.
My bones fill with rain as I sit at the edge
of the terrace, the cracked thunder drum
of volcano and cloud all around.
I whisper her red name and resurrect
the turtle into peregrination. She lumbers
across the muddy yard in cycles of lift
and place, each trudge a ponder.
Water beats against her bloodied armor.
Gods climb out of her back clutching
bits of bone and bumpy flesh
ready to make the fissured world.
Marian Urquilla
Marian Urquilla’s creative work explores the intersections of exile, spirituality, and identity. Her poems have appeared in The Acentos Review, The Indianapolis Review, West Trestle, and the Journal of Latina Critical Feminism. She is the winner of Midway Journal’s 2024 Flash Prose and Poetry Contest, a finalist for the 2024 Stephen Dunn Prize at Solstice Literary Magazine, and a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee. She is an alum of VONA, the Kearny Street Interdisciplinary Writers Lab, the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, and the Highlights Foundation’s Whole Novel Workshop. She lives with her wife in California’s East Bay.