Study of Eleven Outlines

placed in moss, white blooms to tiny dots. one side 
matted over and a moon-colored piece missing. 





if separated, the small cosmology takes on a still-life 
sense, rendering it then abstract.





in one pond, the bottom is scraped bare of bones.
the head turned slightly—disassociated in seeing. 





an ideal estranged from subject. what we had 
missed: soft, gutted, absent among wonder. 





the pattern was described as made of bowls,
as in beneath water, it is easy to dislocate from vision. 





found in the street and in my view, my view reasonably 
caught and distracted thinly. 





the word flaw conveys vision and loss. the papery outer skin 
in flaw, whether sadder or in shadow. 





two ducks are drawn near a plate of fruit—
neither caught to the past and both rationally looking away. 





illegible yellow ovals pass across the water’s surface. each
syllable numerous. 





at wood’s edge, an echo restrains. small blue faces unseamed
in the foliage and convinced each is unexpressive.  





no reality guides. nobody is lost or off-center. each becoming 
further from another’s actuality. 

ξ

Sara Lupita Olivares is the author of Migratory Sound (The University of Arkansas Press), which was selected as winner of the 2020 CantoMundo Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New York Times, Bennington Review, Salt Hill Journal, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. She currently lives in northern New Mexico, where she is an assistant professor of English at New Mexico Highlands University.