ja'net danielo / poem

Danielo Home Movies [Once, I saw myself from outside myself]

Once, I saw myself from outside myself.

Three years old, in tears, head of wild curls

screaming into the side of my bed–as

if through a telescope’s eye, from a place

of empty black sky. Sometimes I recall 

the heat of my tears, their warmth on my skin. 

Other days, it’s the black sky’s soft swoosh in

my ear, a breathlessness whose origins

I don’t quite know. In the quietest place 

on Earth, an anechoic chamber in

Minnesota, it takes just 45

minutes to become something else, breathe to

the swoosh & gurgle of your own blood, hold

the timbre of a heart inside a mouth.

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Ja'net Danielo is the author of the chapbooks This Body I Have Tried to Write, winner of the MAYDAY 2022 Poetry Micro Chapbook Editors' Choice Award, and The Song of Our Disappearing (Paper Nautilus, 2021). She has been awarded grants from the de Groot Foundation and the Arts Council for Long Beach and has been a winner of the River Heron Editors' Prize and the Fischer Prize, an honorable mention for the Tom Howard Prize, and a finalist for the Jake Adam York Prize, the Brittingham and Felix Pollak Prizes in Poetry, the James Hearst Poetry Prize, and the Lascaux Prize in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in The Journal, North American Review, swamp pink, and Diode, among other places. Originally from Queens, NY, Ja'net lives in Long Beach, CA, where she facilitates Word Women: Poetry Heals, a free virtual poetry workshop series for cancer patients and survivors. You can find her at www.jdanielo.com.