EMERGENCE

  Anna Atkins prepares her cyanotypes

by Iris A. Law

The image appears underwater—
like baptism, like dawn, like resurrection.

Shadow of the specimen emerging
from gull-gray ground to swim in color,

brilliant, like lake glass or firmament—
a tangle of smoke or ghostly antlers,

all unabashed blue. I’ve learned
what it means to prepare the body:

Light transforms the ground, and when
we are peeled from the leaf of our proving

and washed clean of wind and current,
stripped of the memory of small creatures

darting through the shallows around our skirts,
the shape of us, the blades of our breasts

and the braids of our branches, pressed

and arranged under glass, is all that stays.

Iris A. Law is the author of Periodicity (Finishing Line, 2013). Her work has been published in journals such as The New England Review, The Georgia Review, and The Offing and has most recently been anthologized in The Nature of Our Times: Poets on America's Lands, Waters, Wildife, and Other Natural Wonders (Paloma, 2025) and They Rise Like A Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women Poets (Blue Oak, 2022). From 2009–2022, Iris served as cofounding editor of Lantern Review: A Journal of Asian American Poetry.