Tory V. Pearman

Sometimes in My Dreams I See St. Thomas Then Realize I’m Just Looking in the Mirror

—after Eduardo C. Corral

Doubt rises like the moon each night.

Doubt is a tree branch mimicking a skeleton’s hand.

No one can catch doubt, pin its thorax to a shadowbox.

Doubt continues knocking even after the door has shut.

In my heart, doubt blooms and unfurls, a black blossom.

Fear funnels doubt, carving underground tunnels that snake like veins.

I smile at doubt, but it understands it as a threat.

I understand doubt as the soul of hope.

For some, doubt is a catalyst, for others, a sleep paralysis.

When wounds close, they crust over with doubt.

In my sentences, doubt is at once subject and verb, direct and indirect object.

When we play hide-and-seek, doubt is always the seeker.

Doubt’s palms press against mirrors, finding only loneliness.

Like a bullet, doubt lodges when it hits the heart.

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Statement of Homage 

I first read Eduardo C. Corral’s “Lines Written During My Second Pandemic” on October 31, 2022, when it was featured on the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day. I was transfixed by the author’s meditation on loneliness and how each line captured a different subtle feature of the condition. Taken together, the poem represents the nuances of loneliness—how it can be at once an outside agent that works upon you, an internal agent that you conjure yourself, and an object that you can act upon. Immediately, I was inspired to create my own meditation. At first, I thought about how anxiety can manifest in similarly nuanced ways, but the word itself didn’t seem right for the poem. That made me think about how the skeleton of my own anxiety is really just doubt—doubt in myself and others. I was then reminded of St. Thomas’s doubt and how it is double-edged: it is both an act of disbelief that can be paralyzing, but also an active search for knowledge that can be productive. That continual, uncertain searching is not unlike Corral’s loneliness. It was later, as I was working on this statement, that I noticed that Corral’s poem is itself an homage to the Italian poet Franca Mancinelli, and I felt a sense of connection through and across words and space to both poets, as well as a belief in my own work to produce more strands of this poetic web.

Eduardo C. Corral

Eduardo C. Corral, a son of Mexican immigrants, currently lives in Raleigh, NC. where he teaches creative writing at North Carolina State University. He is an award-winning poet whose work has appeared in journals like The New Republic, Poetry, and Ploughshares. He is author of two poetry collections, Guillotine (2020) and Slow Lightning (2012), which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets award. He is known for his “seamless blending of English and Spanish, tender treatment of history, and careful exploration of sexuality” (Poetry Foundation).

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