R. A. Villanueva's "When She Finds the Moon Tonight My Daughter"

Thoughts on being narrators of wonder.

When She Finds the Moon Tonight My Daughter

grabs my arm and narrates her happiness,
explaining how all that sky up there cuts
the moon in two like a sliced grape then

pulls open her bookbag, digs through her snacks
to find one to hold up to the dark, juice
running the curve of her chin—


from A Holy Dread (Alice James Books, 2026)

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The first poem, “Cusp,” in R. A. Villanueva’s newest collection, A Holy Dread, which I have been beyond excited for, and which came out this past week, and which you should read immediately, begins with these lines:

A week home and my nephew has
now surprised me with this tooth he

places in my palm with the force
and grace of a small god.

I love R. A. Villanueva’s work deeply; I love it, in part, for this kind of rigorous attention and care that it directs toward seeming-littleness: the “tooth” placed in the palm, the child who has the “grace of a small god.”

Indeed, that opening poem ends with a blessing:

Blessed are all
these gifts and songs from our young skulls.

I had the recent luxury, just a few months ago, of hearing today’s poem read aloud twice in the span of just a few weeks. The first — at I. S. Jones’ book launch for her seminal work, Bloodmercy. And the second — at my own book launch. If I’m not mistaken, I believe I asked for it. You see, today’s poem sits in the heart of A Holy Dread, amidst a section of poems titled “Mirabilary” — a word more people should know, a word that means someone who writes of wonders.

In that section, Villanueva has a poem, “Hallelujah Sings the Choir and I,” that begins in song, a song that Villanueva sings, standing there, right there, in front of the microphone. And god, is it a heartbreaking poem, one of tragedy and even horror, a poem sitting amidst the fact that, as Villanueva writes, “What dreams I can remember are the dreams / that frighten me most.” It is a poem of the unavoidable losses that surprise us even with their certainty. And it is a poem of the avoidable losses placed upon us by those with power in a country that encourages violence rather than prevents it. And yet, and yet, and yet. It is a poem, too, about living. Living with hope in a moment of hopelessness, with life in a moment of lifelessness, with what and who you have in a moment of remembering what and who you’ve lost.

It is a poem, as so much of Villanueva’s work is, and as he writes in another poem of his, about:

inviting each body to join
in their own way, so we
might face together these
restless monsters we have
made for ourselves.

It is that I get excited about when I read Villanueva’s work — that capacity for holding, that sense that, even amidst loss and heartbreak, there is a place for the poem to invite you — yes, you — into the embrace of its lines and turn with it together toward the light, or turn, with light, toward the darkness.

And so, I asked Villanueva to read (and sing) this poem aloud at my book launch. And, let me tell you, those months ago, he did. I stood there and listened as Villanueva sang in a room full of people. It was beautiful, the frequency of his voice sitting the way song does in a place of silent, as light does upon water, flickering and melting, shimmering above the deep. Right then, right there, he was a mirabilary. He was mirabilarous.

Today’s poem sits in the same choir of poems as the poem of loss that begins with song. I love that. It sits in a section of poems named after someone who speaks of wonders. I love that, in doing so, it sits alongside a poem of tragedy and offers a child’s voice: all that sky up there. The moon a sliced grape. All that wonder, right? That sliced grape is an echo of the little tooth placed in a bigger hand from the poem that begins Villanueva’s book. And these echoes, paired together: they come from the mouths of small gods — children, people who Villanueva, as a writer, treats with the seriousness that comes with devotion.

More and more, I think that what comes to define our art is not necessarily what we offer our attention toward, but rather how we treat what we offer our attention toward. There are children throughout this book by Villanueva. They are everywhere, in so many poems. They are sleeping on shoulders and they are drooling and they are holding grapes up to the sky and they are making vast, beautiful, profound statements about the world we live in. You would be forgiven, then, for saying that Villanueva’s poems are about children. You would be forgiven, then, for saying that children are a topic of Villanueva’s poetry. These things are true, yes, but they are true in some small sense and not in the sense of something larger and more expansive. Such statements are rooted in the sense of the what — the sense of things that makes us ask what is this about when confronted with something we have yet to know, or are about to encounter. I would argue that a deeper truth of Villanueva’s work is that his poetry takes children seriously. Such a statement, I’d argue, is more about how he treats what his poems are about. What we take seriously, then, is, in part, what defines our art. And, in turn: what we take seriously is what defines our lives.

In today’s poem, for example, Villanueva does not refute his daughter. No, he lets her proclamation stand on its own. He gives such wonder the full grace of a poem. And, later in the book, in the middle of a long poem that describes the even longer isolation of lockdown, Villanueva writes, of his son:

Nothing
is ever all-gone, he says, gently
drowning a small cactus
he carried from the bodega
before it shuttered for good. Later,
he will list the names of everyone
we miss.

This, I think, embodies what I mean. For Villanueva, the wonders of children are not to be refuted. They have, as he writes, the “grace” of “small god(s).” In today’s poem, the voice of a child makes us consider, once more, the sky. In this poem above, the voice of a child makes us remember, once more, those we love. In both poems, these children are keepers of artifacts (a grape!) and tenders of living things (a cactus!). These are serious truths, and Villanueva treats them as such. If, as I sometimes think, our vision narrows as we age, then it is a kind of labor to insist on widening the very limits of what we take seriously. It is a kind of labor to push against the force of a world that confines us more rigidly into what is allowed. It is a kind of labor to insist, again and again, on being moved to joy or wonder or remembrance by someone just born into this world, their sense of color growing by the day. It shouldn’t be hard, is what I am trying to say, but the world sometimes makes it so.

My wife and I are expecting our first child any day now, and I have spent the better part of this past week reading A Holy Dread. It’s been a beautiful experience, because these poems, like today’s, sit like satellites pointed toward the very stars that kids often remind us we are made of.

Amidst this pending joy, I often have considered that there is a kind of grief that comes with growing older and growing up; it is the grief, I think, of regret and loss, of knowing you are living on borrowed time, the grief of wondering what could have been while what continues to happen continues happening. There are many big and little deaths along the way, time lost and things lost, people who you never said goodbye to, people who you once met who you will never meet again. The grief of growing older is a realization of these losses, an understanding that life is so full of them that it feels, at times, impossible to account for it all. I wonder sometimes if it is that grief that turns us inward and narrowed, that makes us take seriously something other than the wonder of the moon sitting like a sliced grape in the sky. I wonder if it is a kind of protection. If it is, I get it. This life hands losses to us like time hands seconds to a clock.

I think of that grief when I consider the fact of having a child, a fact I can’t quite make sense of, this burst of wonder in a world that sometimes stifles such wonder. I caught myself weeping the other day, driving home with a carload of groceries in preparation for everything. I had just stood for ten minutes with the cashier, an older woman who couldn’t help but ask about the enormous amount of, well, everything I was buying. When I told her that it was in preparation for having a child, she briefly stopped ringing up my groceries, and it was as if we were no longer standing together in a checkout line in New York City, but were instead transported to a hospital room across town, on the East Side, where, decades ago, she gave birth to her only child, a daughter, and looked out the window onto the East River to see her father-in-law, an avid sailor, floating downriver in a boat with a banner unfurled with her name on it. She told me that story and I stood there in disbelief and joy as she snuck some flowers into my cart and offered every single piece of advice she could, as if she might melt away, dissolve into the air like a murmuration of starlings dissipating.

It’s been like that, these months. You tell people such news and something in them shifts, and they are wistful and buoyant, remembering again something a bit like magic. They offer advice and little tricks. They pull you close and whisper something spell-like and enchanted. One woman, who must have been in her 80s, saw me carrying a giant box of diapers into my apartment building and immediately followed me up the stairs, asking about the baby, and then asking about my wife, and then insisting upon seeing my wife. I couldn’t get a word out! She stood next to me, chatting nonstop, while I fumbled with the keys of my apartment door, trying to balance this teetering box of diapers, and then she walked right into my apartment to take a look at my wife. It’s like a hall pass for wonder, this news. Anything goes.

For nearly half of the time I have been writing this newsletter, my wife and I were trying to have a baby. For a couple years, it didn’t work. Those years were different than these past months, and I still don’t really know how to talk about them. They were more silent, and frustrating, and lonely. I worked on essays that I couldn’t finish. The two of us stopped making plans about a future we wanted to happen and started making plans about a future we did. What I remember most, though, were these mornings, these endless appointments at the clinic just after dawn and just before work, when we’d sit together in the waiting room with countless other women, everyone there to get blood drawn, to get their bodies injected. I’d sit there and look at these people in the sunrise light and realize that they, too, would go out into the world, their day beginning with so much trying before their lives continued with it.

I had a hard time with wonder then. I grieved the loss of something I hadn’t yet encountered. I watched someone I love submit herself to strangeness. I disposed of myself in cups. I journeyed to a windowless room somewhere in Chelsea to sit alone on a chair covered in plastic to figure out if it was possible to be a dad. We treated ourselves to carrot cake for breakfast. We tried our hardest.

It shifted in an instant, an instant I’ll never forget. And it didn’t shift because we tried harder. I know that, because I know that there are people with whom we sat in those morning rooms who tried as hard as they could, who are perhaps still trying, who might never stop. I think about them every day. All that trying, and so much of it invisible and silent and lonely. My gosh. The only thing I can chalk it up to is grace. We were sitting somewhere on the other side of what we wanted, and it was grace that carried us across.

And that’s why, I think, I’m thinking of wonder now. It’s why I’m grateful for it. Because I really don’t know. Because I can’t explain it. Because maybe the moon is a sliced grape in the sky. Because we have these little teeth that fall out of our mouths. Because we live amongst small gods. I have to take it seriously. Because sometimes it feels like it has saved my life. Because it has certainly allowed for it. Because it keeps on allowing for more.

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1. A friend and fellow teacher from Minneapolis shared a couple links for mutual aid resources, in case you have the means to offer anything. Here they are:

   1. Safe Haven MN

   2. MPLSMutualAid

2. My novel, Pilgrims, is out in the world, and I am deeply grateful. Thank you for reading it and sharing it and all sorts of things. If you are interested, you can buy it here. Consider writing a review on Goodreads if you’d like. Consider asking for it from your local library. I appreciate it. Thank you a million times over.

3. The word ceasefire seems to be just a word. As news outlets report, Israel has violated the terms constantly, and, as the Gaza Sunbirds posted awhile ago, the language of ceasefire does not mean a language of peace, and, as Doctors Without Borders stated, it certainly does not mean that help is not needed. Consider donating to Doctors Without Borders here as they continue their work in Gaza. And please consider following and supporting the work of The Sameer Project (link here) and The Gaza Sunbirds (link here) as they provide on the ground support for Palestinians in Gaza.

4. If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.