R. A. Villanueva
Just before their wedding, Paige Lewis and Kaveh Akbar brought friends together for a community benefit at Elliott Bay Books. I have always loved the flier they posted for the celebration: a photo of a stoneware vase up top, its contours and cardioid forms growing around two sets of fingers, each nail painted pink; those hands, in turn, cradling four small, sculpted plantains.
And floating there, aligned along the outside edges of the image, above a list of our gathered names, these phrases in all-caps: “KANGAROOS,” “SEQUINS,” “CHOCOLATE SODAS,” “YOU REALLY ARE BEAUTIFUL!”
As I look back now through years of scrawls and notes, I am realizing how much “Epithalamion beginning with The Tempest”owes to that design, Genesis Belanger’s Pieta, and Frank O’ Hara’s “Today.” It’s as if my reply to the invite was always reaching for the tender strangeness of her ceramics, the exuberance—and defiance—of his poem.
Every version of my sonnet opens with worrying through Shakespeare while my son makes a mess. He embraces his favorite stuffed dinosaur, oblivious to morning headlines and my nerves. Then, drafts stall. It’s pages and pages of that first septet or so surrounded by wandering freewrites, arrows to track false starts, redactions and rhyme schemes in brackets.
What eventually became the very last piece in A Holy Dread isn’t the same promised gift I started in 2017 and shared aloud that joyful night in Seattle. I wrestled with the ending for a long time, unsure of how to finish. Finally, in 2019, ink scratches in the corner of my journal gave way to a cloudburst of words: “LAUGHTER,” “EMPIRE,” “HEADSTONE,” “ORCHID,” “BONES TURNED TO OPAL.”
•
"Epithalamion beginning with The Tempest" (poem), A Holy Dread by R. A. Villanueva, Alice James Books, 2026.
Photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan
