Veronica Beatrice Walton
is an educator and writer who divides her time between New Jersey and New York City. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Cardiff Review, Journal of New Jersey Poets, Ponder Review, Ethel, The Bitchin' Kitsch, Sledgehammer, and others. Her debut chapbook Hiraeth: 17 Love Poems was published by Ethel Micro-Press in March 2023. She is also author of the (partially published) children's picture book, Phoebe the Mighty Mermaid.
Hiraeth: 17 Love Poems
Out now!
Written, in the midst of quarantine heartache, this terse collection is a testament to nostalgia, lust, grief, to being in your early 20s: when your idea of “love” is making you feel more lost than found, more fragmented than whole, but still wanting it, wanting it so badly. These are 17 poems about romantic, sexual, and familial love, all tied up with the theme of “hiraeth”: the Welsh idea of longing for a past that never quite existed.
Excerpts
Eurydice, Little Stone Journal
Are you awake, Aunt Persephone? I am entering
your song-shaped mouth. Dripping with nectar, your
chin the variegated mantle of a bird. What
was it like to follow a man into the Underworld?
I am taking notes, methodologies of abandon...
Heartbreak Aubade, Miniskirt Magazine
There is a kindness in emptiness, an admission. You can
do anything with heartbreak, so I dreamt of the
Great Wall. I dreamt of canals and the soles of
our feet and the entryway of God. That is to say, the things
that stand between us also somehow lead me to you, in
some great surrogate world...
Pastoral with Lighthouse, Ethel Zine
I can see you: you are a shape moving towards me across the lawn. It is hard to tell if you are moving towards or away from the sea; I have never had a sure sense of direction, only my hands’ nascent topographies. Still, you were never there, never in any direction at all. You are looking at me like an alien on a distant planet wondering if there is also life. My hands, history’s telescope, wound up in prophecy.
Addressing Rosemary Kennedy, Journal of New Jersey Poets
Rosemary, a child told me once that a bed can’t walk because it would scratch up the floor. What have you tracked into the house with your fury? As a child, I had to be taught to walk up and down stairs. I used to draw pictures of flowers that don’t exist. If they cut down the tree in front of my house, how will I know my right from my left? How will my landmarks survive, these soft heuristics of the world?