Work

—After Eduardo C. Corral


Like the blush of an aurora
glimpsed in the south, wonder startles.

Wonder presses flowers in a pocket press

and ducks under swags of spruce
as if every garden is a secret.

In a rainstorm, wonder hunkers on a tree limb,
twitches its feathers intricate as woodwork.

Dew pearls the morning spiderwebs with wonder.

Even strings of satellites are wonderful
beneath the steady stars.

But no one wants to hear about all your wonder
over a cappuccino:

wonder is skittish, like cottontails
nibbling grass under the pokeweed.

No, I don’t find it every day—wonder is the work.

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Aza Pace’s debut poetry collection, Her Terrible Splendor, won the 2024 Emma Howell Rising Poet Prize and is forthcoming from Willow Springs Books. Her poems appear in The Southern Review, Copper Nickel, Tupelo Quarterly, Crazyhorse, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. She is the winner of two Academy of American Poets University Prizes and holds an MFA from the University of Houston and a PhD from the University of North Texas.