Tiger-eyed
the rains came one year late
crying in the park, I find a baby beside me
it will not budge
bloodless, we stare, not speaking
the same language
an entire year empty of water
& then
snow piling onto
another city
it is January but flowers are blooming
out of the eyes of my home
I still have not been there
but I imagine them
yellow, silent
the baby watches me now, from behind a tree
I’m not sure what has become of me
it was futch fall & a season
of three faims
I watch as my memory grows three-pronged
like some surrealist castle
inside of the storm, shelter
but I still miss it all, my home & my own
sweet baby, tiger-eyed,
running
through the grass
Vanessa Holyoak is a Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary writer and artist. Their writing—spanning lyrical nonfiction, hybrid fiction, art criticism, and poetry—explores the fluid dimensions of identity through intimate engagements with memory, loss, and opacity. Their visual art practice bridges intermedial installation and photo poetics to take up questions of diasporic and ecological disappearance. Holyoak's first novel, I See More Clearly in the Dark, published in 2023 by Sming Sming Books (second edition and ebook 2025), explores the longing for forestial darkness in an era of hyper-illumination. They are currently working on an essay collection on the loss of their childhood home in the Los Angeles fires. Holyoak’s writing has been published in Artforum, ASAP/Journal, BOMB Magazine, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, East of Borneo, e-flux, frieze, Hyperallergic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, TURBA: The Journal for Global Practices in Live Arts Curation, and elsewhere.