Nina Colette Peláez

Poetry

Nina Colette Peláez is a poet, artist, educator, and cultural producer based in Maui, Hawaii. An adoptee born in Las Vegas and raised in Brooklyn, she holds an MFA from Bennington College and is Associate Director of The Merwin Conservancy, an arts and ecology organization that cares for the home and garden of poet W.S. Merwin. An emerging writer, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Baltimore Review, Rattle, Pleiades, RHINO, Cider Press Review, and Fairy Tale Review. A 2024 AWP Writer to Writer mentee, she is working on the manuscript for her first poetry collection. Visit her online at ninapelaez.com

 

Aureole

“The photograph of the missing being . . . will touch me like the delayed rays of a star” —Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida There is no body, no way for me to know her face, gazing vacant from the casket where some stranger placed her carefully. Their arms heavy with her, touching her, they held her like a child, held her in a way I never will. I am trying to recall a memory that isn’t mine. Now, she is ash and I’m the aftermath: a sorrow she swaddled in the clutch of her skinny arms for just a moment, then passed along. In the only photograph I have of her, she is eighteen, pregnant with me. Halo of blonde hair teased around her head, gray cat lifted in her clumsy grasp. She doesn’t know that she will die. She is still smiling, eyes wide, mouth faded at the crease, this border I have failed to breach.

“ This poem was written after learning that my biological mother had passed away, almost twenty years before I learned of her death. Growing up, all I had of her was a single photograph with her first name and the date handwritten on the back. This very ordinary photograph was my only connection to her, and I have cherished it. As an art historian, I have long been fascinated by the power of photographs to connect us to what we might otherwise be unable to access, unable to touch. This poem aims to speak to that, and to the limits of what images allow us to reach. ”

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