Yanaguana volume 1, issue 2 spring/summer 2026 a literary journal from San Antonio, Texas
Joni Wallace
Winter Sonnets
“so I kiss your mouth
until it hurts”
“crows littering graves
in crows in Paris”
“I know you as I know harm”
Winter Sonnet (2)
I am not afraid when you appear
next to the bed I understand
the difficulty of being seen
in this world weightless
I don’t remember last night
the ground a mottled hollow
of crane flies was it—
would you like to close your eyes
what is your part now if not blue
in a film I put an arm through
I choose the scene to play in my head:
ashen flies blowballs
in the vast noir
you try on every detail
Winter Sonnet (3)
Where do you think they’ve gone
the wild dogs of morning
yip-tricks the kill-pack
& you there amongst ten trillion
stars blinkering syntax
It was like this long before
& will be long after
I know you as I know harm
fur remnants scarlet bloom
of an unlucky rabbit
pinna tuned toward
the glistening
a satellite’s signaling
in the listening dark
Winter Sonnet (6)
& I dreamt of blades
a butcher who could
carve someone
dead
yet when I walked
out into the market
of animal hearts
nothing bad had happened
so I kiss your mouth
until it hurts
& you say things
into the otherwise
empty room
while a leaf blower
blows
across the drive
& makes
whatever scaffold
holds us—
electrostatic
planets looping
grief
(the beckoning hook of)
It goes like this:
Winter Sonnet (7)
What wakes me now your face
razor wire a snake coiled
below the wall on the other side
passers-by night voices
a pine beetle’s chur churr chur-churr
There is an arrow: day begins
my hand bleeds into what I touch
a siren—
a hive—
I rise
in a swarm crows littering
graves in crows
in Paris & you emerge
from a syrinx blind staggers
a mezzotint but what is the shape
Winter Sonnet (9)
In the church of bees
I knelt I wept
but do not remember weeping
throne bees tears
seraphim dropped
into a font I am already dead
you said I did not understand
the dialect of insects then
hemolymph how sap can entomb
a body 480 million years old
Outside the hospital a queen
lifted transept
a drone hovered inside a vault
inside a vault inside a vault
Winter Sonnet (10)
Christmas arrives
in a bleaching light
a rivulet
of fire ants
around a mouse jaw
a glint
in the vomit
of an owl
Four javelina enter
Caravaggio-lit
four-faces
umbral
the adobe wall
a visage
for each direction
you would like this
Ezekiel’s angel
your ghost-sheer
your ghost-sheer
a scapula
or sag
along the arroyo
nothing
& no thing
in time with
the wind
“I hope I found a visual form that contains, holds up, and carries the scattering of self, beloved, ghosts of both, and the ghosts of sonnets written by so many before and with me.“
We asked Joni Wallace to share her thoughts about sonnet-making and the “Winter Sonnets.” She said this:
About the poems
These poems are part of a series written in the aftermath of a devastating personal loss. I went through a period of not being able to process the events within my waking life. Language failed to sustain or interest me. My dream life continued, however, extraordinary, vivid, often disturbing. To make matters stranger, early one morning I awoke to find a ghost standing next to the bed. Perhaps this was a vision. I had an immediate and lasting understanding that I was receiving a gift: to be present as the veil lifted, ever so briefly. I was in the presence of the dead. This brought me back to the page.
About the form
I knew intuitively I needed a container for this work. The emotional turbulence and the utter strangeness and isolation of intense grief required it. I’d been teaching a seminar on the sonnet and had come across Mary Ellen Solt’s “Moon Shot Sonnet” in prior months. Written in 1963, the work is concrete, textless, composed of a grid of a Réseau plate from the Ranger 7 moon photographs in the octave and sestet of a Petrarchan sonnet. Solt is playing the Romantic notion of the moon so often represented in traditional sonnets against the complications of imagination arising from its transfiguration to a measurable, seeable, celestial body. This spoke to me.
My form emanates from Solt’s. And is also influenced by Berryman’s 18-line “stripped-down and rebuilt” sonnet form used in the Dream Songs (April Bernard). I eventually settled into 14-lines and my own “grid” of three columns (text, no text, text). I hope I found a visual form that contains, holds up, and carries the scattering of self, beloved, ghosts of both, and the ghosts of sonnets written by so many before and with me. I hope the form allows an effective way for images/language to spark meanings within and across white space, within and across each caryatid-like pillar. The 14-line aspect of the form is both a nod to the sonnet and a way to create a release point, an area of respite, or at least silence at the end of a lyric intensity.
“(F)orm is the energy of the gesture of its making,” says Robert Hass. Indeed. I pulled the poems in and out of this form many times in drafting. The work always settled back in. Now I release it.
Joni Wallace’s third full-length poetry collection is Landscape with Missing River (Barrow Street Press, 2023), recipient of the AZ-NM Book Award. Other honors include Four Way Books’ Levis Prize for her second collection, Blinking Ephemeral Valentine, and fellowships from the Arizona Commission on the Arts and the Baltic Writing Residency. Work from her documentary poetry collection, Kingdom Come Radio Show, is anthologized in Privacy Policy, The Poetry of Surveillance (ed. Andrew Ridker) and has been featured by the Scottish Poetry Library and the Poetry Society of America. She holds an MFA from the University of Montana and is currently a PhD candidate in Literature/Creative Writing at Queen's University, Belfast, NI.