Poetry |

“Night After Night,” “Examination,” “Need Be” and “Lord”

Night After Night

The wheels on display, each thumb holy and not there, breath petals afraid and gasping as three hydrangeas grow out of control.  Where is the momentum, the altars of conceit kneeling into their own shadows?  Yearn for a fish bone and the first borne.  Frequencies of squash and celery, a sipped omission falling down the stairs to dream again.  The diseased cherry tree in the backyard weeps a sap from its bark for the first time.  The tiger on display, a plastic starfish in your hair, one sandal petrified, half the rain cloud and the entire notebook.  Night after night, the cyber enemy and a manifest Paradiso, blood on the toast and the wooden floor misunderstood.  Crowds of computer children afraid to kiss and learn.  The wheels on display, rain forests chest heavy with marked avenues and denied bowls of hot noodles.  Must be the water wars and the dying tree fielding suggestions.

 

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Examination

Intervention where the white surface awaits composition declared without the fulcrum or the bended knee, its attraction to light mistaken for sanctuary and three-dimensional greed where the startled beetle is a carved face on the clock.  The flaw removed from the diamond, the head bowed in grief, discipline and threats, murmurs that don’t restart the system, dark centuries in the heart of arrogance, contradictions as churchyard crusades where calibrated dimensions are allowed because they believe the cleared text is the forgiven word toward an overcrowded heaven.

Calibrated dimension clears this subjective response where data annexes previous attempts to decipher the closed window and the unworn shoes.  Agreement is made to announce a hand full of salt is more effective than touching the right buttons at the moment of closure and the seconds of traced lines on bare knuckles. Careful examination by the staring individual discovers the blank page is the field beyond the staring, a meeting place for the salt from the hand and pure confession before the arrival of oval drops of ink.  Chirping sounds, humid armpits, angry digression revealing how the outline of the rejected biological father got there.

 

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Need Be

Cortisone shot in the hip joint, needle exploring fire, can’t breathe for a moment, sun turning back pain hip cold and aware of skeletal history and the hidden stone tablets.  White table passing out white horizon coming back to the bone to whiten the brain.  Pictured hemispheres, swirling benign tornado kissing the interior.  Technical attrition looking on.  Rattler pragmatists.  Rattler cure.  Light from swimmer’s ripples.

 

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Lord

Lord of the wayward path where a fable is water, adobe geometry unsolved by running toward the dust where borders are flayed with crayons and drowning hands, holy mass as faith selecting the brick alley where you pray, orange sparks on the road and inside the amphibian.  Can you explain how you learned to walk again?  Is it the trinkets in a canoe or the hieroglyphics on a turnip?  Last night, the moon dropped its clothes in the street where the trees cast a near light, making you leave the experiment radiant and silent.  Hand yourself a coin.

Contributor
Ray Gonzalez

Ray Gonzalez is the author of six collections of poems published by BOA Editions — The Heat of Arrivals (1997 PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Book Award), Cabato Sentora, The Hawk Temple at Tierra Grande (2003 Minnesota Book Award), Consideration of the Guitar: New and Selected Poems (2005), Cool Auditor: Prose Poems (2009), and Beautiful Wall, 2015 (2016 Minnesota Book Award). The University of Arizona Press published eight books, including Turtle Pictures. He has also published three collections of essays, including The Underground Heart: A Return to a Hidden Landscape. He is the editor of 12 anthologies, most recently Sudden Fiction Latino:  Short Short Stories from the U.S. and Latin America (W.W. Norton). Ray received a 2017 Witter Bynner Fellowship from The Library of Congress, a 2015 Con Tinta Lifetime Achievement Award in Latino Literature, and a 2002 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Southwest Border Regional Library Association.

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