Category: poetry
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Elegy for a Future Death
Elegy for a Future Death began as a refusal. I wanted to write an elegy that didn’t console, didn’t mythologize, didn’t reach for metaphor. The poem strips away atmosphere and sentiment, leaving only the physical residue of absence: chain, pan, towel, nail. It’s a lyric of erosion—of what remains when return is no longer possible.…
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Rest Stop
Rest Stop” began as a memory fragment—an actual roadside pause that became a corridor for grief. I wanted the poem to resist sentimentality and instead let the environment carry the emotional weight. Every sound, every object, every interruption is doing the work of memory and refusal. The poem is about the failure to name, the…
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Where Are You My Friend…?
This poem emerged from walking through a heat-struck urban lot where absence felt more physical than memory. I wanted the poem to carry abandonment through objects—barbed wire, cats, asphalt—without commentary. The body persists, but only through what it touches. The theme is not grief but residue: what remains when someone doesn’t.
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After the Movie
“After the Movie” emerged from the residue of a theater’s disassembly—the rupture of communal silence into the flicker of screens and the crackle of wrappers. I wanted to capture the moment when the film ends but its emotional architecture lingers in the objects and gestures left behind.
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The Transparent Mother
The Transparent Mother began as a refusal to sentimentalize disappearance. I wanted to write a poem where the mother’s vanishing wasn’t metaphor but physical fact—bare feet, bloody toes, a face turned away. The poem inherits her instability without naming it.
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Vigil
The poem’s central tension—what it means to breathe through another—emerged from thinking about dependence, care, and the porousness between bodies. I wanted the poem to feel like a held moment, a vigil in the literal sense: a watchfulness, a staying‑with.
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Signal Fault
Signal Fault began as an attempt to write a poem built entirely from sound and fracture. I wanted to see how far I could push minimalism without losing emotional pressure. The poem emerged from thinking about how identity behaves under distortion—how a name, a body, or a moment can feel like a signal rising through…
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A Mother’s Request
A Mother’s Request emerged from a desire to honor the physical and emotional pull of homeland in the face of death. I wrote it as a response to the quiet grief of diaspora—the longing to return, not metaphorically, but bodily, to the soil that shaped us.
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Morove Cemetery
Morove Cemetery” began as a walk through memory and inheritance. I wanted to write a poem that refused sentimentality while still holding grief in its architecture. The poem is built from objects—signs, stones, flowers, fences—that carry the emotional weight without commentary. It’s a landscape elegy, where the dead are marked by what survives them: rust,…
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TICONDEROGA
TICONDEROGA began as a meditation on the physical relationship between body and object—specifically, the pencil as a site of memory, refusal, and violence. I wanted to write a poem that treated the pencil as a forensic artifact. The bite marks, the flaking paint, the taste of wood—all of these are real, bodily details. The poem…
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Wail
Wail began as a test of restraint. I wanted to write a death poem without ornament, without metaphor, without reaching for comfort. The whale song emerged early—strange, bodily, and distant—and I kept it because it refused explanation. The poem is about sound that leaves the body and doesn’t come back. It’s about the final sleep…
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The Road They Will Leave By
The Road They Will Leave By” began as a meditation on exclusion and memory. I wanted to write a poem that refused sentimentality and simile, one that relied on physical detail and emotional pressure to convey the quiet violence of being remembered wrongly—or not at all. The soldier’s camouflage, the elders’ breath, the locking of…
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Scarred Body Valentine
Scarred Body Valentine emerged from the aftermath of a surgical trauma that reshaped both my body and my marriage. I wanted to write a poem that refused sentimentality and instead honored the raw, procedural reality of healing—where love is not a balm but a shared endurance. The poem is structured as a medical descent into…
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Reclamation
Reclamation began as a meditation on the chalk line—first as a metaphor for confinement, then as a literal aura traced by radiation machines. I wanted to write a poem that didn’t glorify survival but acknowledged its cost: the neuropathy, the pouchitis, the ache where the colon once lived. The poem lives in the tension between…
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Wepa en el Estadio — Wepa in the Stadium (Poema en tres formas boricuas)
This poem began as a celebration of Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime performance—a moment where Puerto Rican identity, spectacle, and street energy collided on the world’s biggest stage. I wanted to honor the poetic forms of my heritage—copia, décima, bomba—while letting the rhythms of Spanglish, reggaetón, and crowd chant shape the pulse. The poem is…
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Imprint
“Imprint” began as a meditation on the body’s relationship to memory and terrain. I wrote it after revisiting a childhood site—an abandoned road where I once fell. The poem maps that moment not as trauma but as blueprint: a record of contact, fear, and transformation. The quoted line is real, spoken aloud in panic, and…
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A Child’s Memory Poem
This poem began as a memory fragment—an image of a child improvising sanctuary for slugs and snails during a rainy weekend with her father. I wanted to explore how care, grief, and survival manifest through small gestures: a cracked fishbowl, a wilted lettuce leaf, a library book. The poem resists sentimentality and instead leans into…
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Before My Memory Began
Before My Memory Began” comes from the earliest story I was ever told about myself—a moment I cannot remember but have carried as if I lived it. The poem moves between a beach scene and a hospital room, two images that have followed me for years. I wrote it to examine how memory is inherited,…
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A Thing I Do Instead of Sleep
This poem emerged from a sleepless night and a remembered sound—an owl’s hoot imagined against the silence of a hospital corridor. It’s a sonic elegy, a gesture toward the moment my mother’s voice carried the weight of my deafness.
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Late January Arrives
“January Arrives” emerged from a moment of stillness fractured by motion—a hare vanishing into snow, my dog’s bark echoing through the cold. I wrote this poem to honor the tension between presence and disappearance, between the human gaze and the animal trace. I wanted to create a lyric that holds without reaching, that observes without…
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Sillage
This poem began with a scent memory that returned without warning. I followed the physical details—the hand raised, the barrier door, the trace of fuel—until the moment revealed its shape. The poem stays close to gesture and environment because that’s where the truth of the scene lived. The theme grew from the tension between presence…
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Unpacking
“Unpacking” began as a meditation on domestic disorder and the rituals of aging, but quickly unfolded into a layered memory of childhood scatter and paternal absence. I wanted to explore how objects—laundry, drawers, pirate chests, suitcases—carry emotional weight across decades. The poem resists sentimentality and instead leans into the tactile: folding, spreading, shedding. It’s a…
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Stones
“Stones” emerged from a walk with my autistic brother, where the gravel beneath us felt like a ledger—each stone a record of what we’ve inherited and what we must carry. I wrote it to honor the physicality of memory and the way lineage shapes our future terrain. The poem resists sentimentality and abstraction, staying grounded…
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Snapdragon Fields
This poem began as a way to face the presence a parent leaves behind after death. I wasn’t trying to summon anything. I was trying to name the interruptions that still arrive without warning. The poem grew from that tension—how the past steps into the present, how memory can feel like a visitor who won’t…
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Bone Confession
Bone Confession began as a way to name the physical weight I carry from the people I’ve lost and the ones I couldn’t help. The poem grew from a single pulse in the wrist into a record of how the body stores memory—through objects, breath, and the small actions that prove we’re still here. I…
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Reverb
Reverb” emerged from a moment of quiet recognition—when I realized I was speaking in my mother’s cadence, carrying her grief as if it were my own. The poem is built as a series of couplets that echo generational sorrow without resolving it. I wanted the rhythm to waver, to enact the instability of grief itself.…
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Undo
“Undone” emerged from my lifelong reckoning with memory and survival. After losing family members in a tragic accident, I found myself haunted by the idea of reversal—not just of time, but of blame, grief, and the unintelligible aftermath. The poem imagines a world where trauma rewinds: collisions un-happen, blood disappears, and the dead return to…
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Transcription
soundtrack and images transform into words. I wanted to capture how memory and imagination build a foundation—bright doors, roofs wide as sky—out of fragments of fear and joy. The theme is resilience: the act of immersing nightmares in dreams until something sacred emerges.
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Getting There
“Getting There” emerged from the rhythm of my mornings—each act of survival measured, each gesture a hinge between mortality and renewal. I wrote it after noticing how my routines—feeding the dog, checking blood sugar, making coffee—had become a kind of metronome, ticking the sacred rhythm of the day. The poem honors that rhythm and the…
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Prometheus’ Last Day
Prometheus’ Last Day began as a meditation on endurance—what it means to rot without rescue. I wanted to strip the myth of Prometheus down to its final gesture: not defiance, but surrender. The poem resists metaphor and dramatization, choosing anatomical precision and ethical collapse.
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Mourning Mom
This poem emerged from a moment of speculative grief—imagining my mother’s aging voice as a thread I never got to follow. I wanted to write an elegy that refused sentimentality, that honored absence without ornament. The poem’s structure mirrors that ethic: short stanzas, pared-back language, and a final line that lands without flourish.
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J’s Sky
“J’s Sky” emerged from the final moments I shared with someone I loved deeply. I wrote it in the hush that followed her passing, where grief had no metaphor—only gesture. The poem resists sentimentality and instead ritualizes consequence through pared-down language and elemental imagery. The sky becomes a container for ash, not answers. I wanted…
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Peace Lily
Peace Lily began as a quiet observation of my wife’s improbable success with a single plant. Over time, it became a ritual ledger—tracking seasonal displacement, artificial substitutions, and the endurance of living things. The poem’s triadic structure echoes the trinity of life, labor, and love. Its humor is understated, its gestures symbolic: the copper penny…
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This Should Not Be
This Should Not Be” emerged from a moment of ethical rupture—the unbearable knowledge that someone I loved lived in terror until her death. The poem is not a lament but a ritualized protest. I wanted to write something that refused sentimentality and instead enacted consequence. The repetition of “inscrutable” is deliberate—it marks her being trapped…
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One Drop
One Drop emerged from a moment of ritual reflection—when memory of language felt like water evaporating into something divine and unreachable. The poem is a meditation on muffled fluency, divine thirst, and the act of waiting. It’s not a lament but a ritual of scarcity, where prayer becomes a gesture of hope and consequence. I…
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The Empty Chair
This poem originated from the ritual of watching films with someone I loved, and the chair she occupied became a consecrated site after her passing. Each line mimics a film frame rate—24 letters per line—so the poem itself becomes a reel of memory. Commas and dashes act as cuts, splicing grief into cinematic rhythm. The…
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Birds and Milkweed
Birds and Milkweeds emerged from a moment of listening—pressing my ear to my wife’s chest and imagining wings. The poem enacts the illusion of flight that love offers, and the beauty that remains after we fall. Butterflies and milkweed form a memento mori—not of grief, but of transformation. I wanted to write a poem that…
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Author Notes
“Author Notes” emerged from a refusal of wanting to answer the the question game—If you were an animal, which would you be? It demands a transformation I do not want to indulge in. It neglects experience and demands transformation. Instead I indulged with the possibilities of Harold’s Purple Crayon. I imagined writing it with my…
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Finalities
Finalities emerged from a moment of ritual clarity after my mother’s passing. I wanted to honor not just her memory, but the gestures others made to restore her—clipping her hair, dressing her in youth, renaming her Elsi. It stages mourning as a quiet choreography of speculative grace. It’s about the transformation of a woman into…
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For My Older Brother
“For My Brother” came from a quiet moment my brother and I shared, shaped by past pain and recovery. The poem uses body and thought as symbols, with the slash mark showing how deep wounds can leave lasting marks. I wrote it to honor his survival and the work he had done to heal.
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Treatise to My Old Magnificent Maples and Sweetgums
Treatise to My Old Magnificent Maples and Sweetgums began as a procedural elegy—an archive of leaf blowing, tarp dragging, and displacement. My autistic brother and I enacted these rituals season after season, until the house, the trees, and the basement were lost. The poem resists metaphor and sentimentality. It trusts objects, gestures, and consequence. The…
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Shadows and Ghosts and Angels
This poem emerged from a real CT scan I underwent—an experience that felt both absurd and sacred. I wanted to capture the paradox of being scanned for tumors while feeling the warmth of contrast dye and hearing the machine’s screech. The poem resists sentimentality and dramatization. It’s a meditation on diagnostic ritual, the bureaucratic anticlimax…
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Ten Prayer Requests Folded Like Love Notes
This poem began as a private act of grief and ritual—a way to place prayers where no one would find them but God. I wrote it in a shaky, illegible hand, not for clarity but for sincerity. The poem explores themes of sacred concealment, ethical restraint, and the refusal of spectacle. It’s a gesture of…
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Swimming Lessons
Swimming Lessons emerged from a personal ritual of return—three encounters with water that marked my transformation from child to survivor. The poem is structured as a triptych: saltwater initiation, oceanic communion, and chlorinated reckoning. Each stanza ritualizes memory, surrender, and survival. I wanted to explore how water remembers us, how it becomes a witness to…
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Dream Thinking
Cloud Thinking began as a meditation on my dog Cane’s dream logic, but quickly unraveled into a recursive elegy—one that ritualizes grief, football loss, and the surreal grammar of domestic life. The poem leans into speculative consequence: how a bowl of chicken concentrate, a twitching leg, or a cloud formation can become mythic gestures. I…
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Sightlines
Sightlines” emerged from a moment of ritual clarity—when my aging eyes, no longer tasked with precision, began to see through blur into beauty. The poem honors the body’s quiet adaptations and the mind’s compensatory grace. It’s a minimalist elegy for vision, a philosophical gesture toward perception as ritual. I wanted to write something that doesn’t…
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Wrinkle-less
Wrinkle-less emerged from a moment of reflection on how survival—through illness, loss, and aging—leaves marks that are not always visible. I wanted to resist the cultural shorthand that equates wrinkles with wisdom, virtue or experience, and instead offer a poem where absence becomes a site of consequence. The scars, deafness, and neuropathy I reference are…
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The Patterns of Water
The Patterns of Water” emerged from a memory that felt both sacred and procedural—a maternal baptism not of faith, but of consequence. I wanted to honor the ritual of care without sentimentality, to trace the gesture of cleansing as a symbolic tether between vulnerability and becoming. The poem is built on repetition, foam, and the…
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Ghosting
“Ghosting” emerged from the quiet aftermath of survival—after cancer, after loss, after the rituals that remain. It’s a poem about haunting not as horror, but as intimacy: the idea that love, memory, and consequence linger in objects, gestures, and the dog’s bark. I wrote it as a speculative elegy, imagining my own absence as a…
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Getting Lost on Christmas
Getting Lost on Christmas began as a memory of disorientation—driving home after a midnight service, fog thick, the road winding like a question. I wanted to ritualize that moment not as a metaphor for despair, but as a spiritual pause: a place where grace arrives quietly, without asking your name. The poem echoes the nativity…
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Opening Up
Opening Up emerged from a moment of absurd domestic frustration—an aging hand versus a childproof cap. What began as a minor inconvenience unraveled into a meditation on dependency, ritual, and the quiet humiliations of aging. The poem is both elegy and satire, honoring the intimacy of shared routines while resisting sentimentality. I wanted to capture…
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Roadside Cross
Roadside Cross began as a walk with my dog past a forgotten memorial near a Waffle House and Food Lion. What struck me wasn’t just the decay of the cross, but the quiet choreography of grief—how strangers, puddles, rap lyrics, and rain all participated in a ritual of exposure and forgetting. I wanted to write…
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Blue Mercy
“Blue Mercy” began as a quiet observation—a fly, a door, a gesture. But beneath its domestic stillness, I found a philosophical hinge: mercy as both restraint and release. The poem is an allegory of consequence, where the blue swatter becomes a symbol of ethical tension—between intervention and surrender, between light and disappearance. My wife’s presence,…
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Under the Sacred Fig
“Under the Sacred Fig” began as a meditation on lineage, migration, and the quiet rituals that shape identity. Inspired by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai’s Under the Bodhi Tree, I sought to transplant the emotional architecture of ancestral shade into Puerto Rican soil. The fig tree became a hinge—between generations, languages, and departures. This poem honors…
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Getting the Algorithm
Getting the Algorithm emerged from a period of recursive grief and speculative clarity. I wanted to write a poem that refused sentimentality while still honoring the emotional residue of illness, authorship, and identity. The mathematical symbols are not metaphors—they are hinges. Each glyph carries consequence: ∫ as funeral, ∅ as death, ≠¬ as refusal. The…
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In My Dreams
In My Dreams began with a letter—brief, bureaucratic, final. It marked the end of a five-year term of benefit payments from my ex-wife’s pension. That document, so stark in its language, carried more than financial closure. It was the formal end of any secular connection between us. I felt a wave of gratitude for her…
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When the Boys Go Marching Away
When the Boys Go Marching Away began as a meditation on the quiet rituals of departure—how war, faith, and memory braid themselves into the domestic fabric. I wanted to write a poem that resists heroism and sentimentality, that instead lingers in the aftermath: the porches, the ribbons, the daughters named Hope.
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Aural Shelf
Aural Shelf emerged from my evolving relationship with reading as both ritual and mutation. As my eyesight weakened, I began experiencing books through audio, digital, and tactile formats simultaneously. This poem is a speculative elegy for the decay of traditional literary forms—and a celebration of their metamorphosis into hybrid experiences. It’s also a personal archive:…
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Manual for grieving a house blowing away…
Manual for Grieving a House Blowing Away…” emerged from a moment of quiet devastation—watching my home unravel not in fire or flood, but in the slow erosion of memory and ritual. I wrote it as a guide for what cannot be saved, and what must. The poem resists sentimentality and instead offers a liturgy of…
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Soft Closure
Soft Closure” emerged from the quiet aftermath of loss—when grief no longer demands spectacle but settles into the architecture of daily life. The poem is built around a single domestic gesture: a door closing softly. It resists sentimentality and instead leans into restraint, letting silence and echo do the emotional work. I wanted to evoke…
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Love Redacted
Love Redacted is a visual and conceptual poem that explores how intimacy survives under censorship in a totalitarian regime. Through redacted language, classified documents, and restoration files, it reveals that the true emotional weight lies not in what is written, but in what is erased. The poem invites readers to decode longing through absence, transforming…
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One Face Only
One Face Only began as a quiet refusal. I had just turned seventy and found myself staring into a mirror—not with nostalgia or regret, but with clarity. The poem resists the impulse to chase idealized versions of self. It’s about choosing one flawed reflection over a pile of broken possibilities. The cracked mirror became a…
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Leaving Vancouver
Leaving Vancouver emerged from a moment of sensory disorientation—salt, tar, and ocean air mingling with dread. I was struck by how travel, especially cruise travel, promises escape but often delivers confrontation. The poem explores the tension between ritual and unease, between what we hope to leave behind and what insists on following us. Russell’s suitcase…
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January Dream, 1987
January Dream, 1987 emerged from a dream visitation that blurred grief with peace. My mother, who had died decades earlier, returned in the dream not to ascend, but to sign love into my palm—wordless, tactile, and precise. The poem resists sentimentality and myth, honoring ambiguity and consequence. It’s an American sonnet that turns on ethical…
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A Proper Fold
A Proper Fold emerged from my ongoing exploration of ritual as both inheritance and resistance. I wanted to write a poem that honored the quiet violence of conformity—how grief, gender, and legacy get folded into gesture. The speaker is a 4-F child shaped by military precision and familial duty, yet excluded from the honors that…
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Sunset Visit
“Sunset Visit” emerged during a twilight walk through a cemetery near my childhood home. I was struck not by grief, but by the contrast between the quiet of the dead and the noisy solitude each visitor carried—thoughts, regrets, memories. The poem began as a study in light and stone, but deepened into a meditation on…
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Those Days of Paella and Football
This poem began as a memory—Saturday rituals in Little Havana with my father and his second wife, just before Miami Hurricanes games. We’d eat paella, sit in the Orange Bowl, and ride home in his light blue Mercedes. It was the only time I saw him truly happy. But the poem isn’t just about nostalgia.…
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Obscene
Obscene emerged from a moment of enforced solitude in a room I did not choose but had to occupy. I tried to honor its silence, but my breath—wet, rhythmic, insistent—kept happening. It wasn’t mine. It wasn’t anyone’s. It was a fact, and it offended. I realized then that breath, stripped of metaphor, is a kind…
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El Yunge: A Famiy Outing- A Tale of Terror
About El Yunque I wanted to write a comic horror poem that stages ecological violence as ritual spectacle. The genesis came from imagining a family trip gone wrong—not through sentiment or tragedy, but through infestation, bureaucracy, and the refusal of metaphor. The rainforest becomes a machine of consequence, where mosquitoes chant zvuv and frogs fall…
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Reclamation Song
Reclamation Song emerged from my refusal to inherit grief as myth. I wanted to write a poem that dismantled lineage without dramatizing it—where the speaker doesn’t mourn but revises. The tree is not metaphor; it’s archive, reliquary, and burden. Each stanza performs a gesture: excavation, disinheritance, refusal, and rebuilding. I invoked Tsi’yugunsini to align with…
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The Shaker Chair
“The Shaker Chair” began as a meditation on absence—how sacred objects lose their purpose when belief erodes. I was drawn to the Shaker chair as a symbol of readiness, reverence, and silence. The poem inverts that grace, replacing angelic possibility with corporeal desecration. It’s not a condemnation—it’s a witnessing. The man who occupies the chair…
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When Writing Becomes too Difficult
When Writing Becomes Too Difficult was written as a counterweight to James Sacré’s vision of poetic collapse. I wasn’t interested in rebuttal—I wanted to explore what survives when language fails. The poem is built from gesture, residue, and consequence. It resists metaphor and flourish, favoring domestic precision and ethical witnessing. Its architecture enacts marginality, and…
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Someone Passes at 8 a.m. and the Birds Do Not Sing
This poem began as a refusal. I wanted to interrogate the cultural impulse to romanticize death—to project meaning onto birdsong, rain, and sunlight in the wake of loss. The poem dismantles these gestures, exposing how metaphor often obscures rather than reveals. It’s not an elegy. It’s a critique of elegy. The theme is not grief…
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Six Hours of Silence— And Then
Six Hours of Silence—And Then” emerged from a moment of quiet observation during a layover — the kind of liminal space where strangers share time without speaking. I was struck by how intimacy can flicker and vanish in seconds, how the ache of almost-connection lingers longer than we expect. The poem is built around that…
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Flight Track
Flight Track began as a meditation on the quiet obsession of watching a plane’s progress across a screen. I was drawn to the emotional architecture of measurement—how altitude, speed, and descent become metaphors for survival. The poem uses restraint and ritual to explore what it means to track motion without touching it, and how even…
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Shedding
Shedding began as a meditation on the rituals we inherit and the ones we invent to survive grief. I wanted to write a poem that honored the quiet choreography between father and son—the way they speak through thermostats, boiled peanuts, and Dolphins talk. The “fortune cookie” structure emerged as a way to hold fragments of…
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I Will Not Go to the Light Having Known Nothing of the Darkness
I wanted to write a poem that metabolized silence, that honored the gestures we inherit but never name. The title came first—a vow not to bypass darkness in pursuit of light. From there, each stanza became a vessel: bruised fruit, a crocheted blanket, a drawer that won’t close. I wrote it to preserve what frays.
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In My Natural Habitat
I wrote In My Natural Habitat after a moment of stillness at a crosswalk—watching a limping pigeon thread itself through traffic while someone behind me shouted to move. That tension between urgency and pause, between public gesture and private recognition, became the emotional seed of the poem. This piece explores how urban life shapes our…
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Photo Stop
This poem began as a meditation on gesture—specifically, the act of photographing something not to share, but to preserve a private emotional truth. I was thinking about how grief often manifests in small, unceremonious rituals: lifting a phone, deleting and retaking an image, placing it back in a purse chosen for protection rather than style.…
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I’ve been thinking lately-
This poem emerged from a long season of physical suffering and spiritual reckoning. I wanted to write not about Christ as symbol, but as body—torn, witnessed, and echoed in the gestures of ordinary life. The hawk, the scar, the breath—all became sites of ritual and recognition. I’m interested in how the sacred survives in silence,…
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When the city leaves you—
When the City Leaves You is a poem about the aftermath of abandonment—personal, civic, and emotional. It unfolds in fragments, each stanza a vignette of silence, gesture, or failed connection. The speaker moves through a landscape of urban decay and quiet witnessing, encountering figures who reflect their own disorientation. The poem resists resolution, instead dignifying…
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Flash Flood
Flash Flood is a poem of witness—set in the Tennessee hills during a sudden flood—and traces the unraveling of lineage, memory, and land. The poem honors the quiet promise to stay, even when everything is being undone.
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Still Life with Eraser
Still Life with EraserOn the news againthere is a still image—a little girl,standing outside the schoolshe will never enteragain.She is wearinga yellow dressprinted with childrenrunning through a field of lavender—one boy, in particular,has paused mid-playto gift his crusha five-thorn rose.I’ve written beforeabout other childrenwith her same sad end:ones who attendedother schoolsand never came homeon the…
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An International Marriage
An International Marriage I learned a foreign languagebecause I wanted to speak to you.Learn not just your words,but your childhood,your grief, the way your motherfolded everything in prayer,the unspoken silence of why your father left the room without saying goodbye. I studied your syntax so Ican read your scripture.But, I mispronounced your sorrows,placed the wrong…
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The Rain Knows My Name
The Rain Knows My NameThe rain never forgets me.It waits—in the cornersof my quiet house—for that first tasteof morning coffee to come—and for meto look upand noticethe darkening sky.It crawled and fell the same wayon her last day of hospice.She watched the ceiling tilesform clouds—listened tothe rain tap the window.I held her hand.The rain held…
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A Peach Seed Thrown Away
A Peach Seed Thrown AwayIt was late spring—the kind of daythat wears winter’s breath.I was seventeen,waiting for the 6:42 a.m. trainto take meto my college interview.I wasn’t sureI wanted to go.The station was mostly empty—just the usual commuters,coffee cups steaming—small altars of routine.He stood near the vending machine,maybe a few years older,maybe not.He wore a…
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Arguing with the Dead
Arguing With the DeadBegin by calling her by name,not the one etched on the granite monument in front of you,not the one printed on the birth certificate—that temporary name another motherwas forced to dream upin the haze of post-labor fade,in the ecstasy of seeing youfor the first time—something that grew for nine monthsinside this other,and…
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The Birds Remember Everything
A lyrical meditation on city birds, memory, and instinct. This poem honors the quiet rituals of return, grief, and the histories we refuse to name.
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Jonathan Moya vs Jonathan Moya
Jonathan Moya vs. Jonathan MoyaI know this will happen one day—I walk into a diner with my wife,during the Costa Rican stopoverof our South American cruise.The waiter says, “Table for Moya?”I say, “Yes.”Another man stands up.He says, “Si, aqui.”We stare at each other.Same first name.Same last name.Same spelling.He has two middle names.I have just one.Different…
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My Ghost Catalog
My Ghost Catalog There are ghosts that haunt me—that will not let me see them,only feel their essence.The ones that prod my skinwith maternal hands,announce themselves to my senseswith the scent of mangoes,pan de aqua,the chanting of forgotten lullabies,the tingling of milkdropped onto my tongue—all the light heavinessof memory.They curl beside me in sleep,cribbing me…
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Recurring Dream 101
Recurring Dream 101I askthe dream again—where did I lose her?Was it in the gestures of departurecreased with our knowings?—The red scarf she removes before our boarding—just after the breeze passes through us—a quick and unspoken thing-that doesn’t linger—the scarf she folds precisely, carefullyand places inside her blue windbreaker pocketlined with the warmththat shields her from…
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Brief Encounter on Aisle Five
Brief Encounter on Aisle FiveIt is this way:She sees him first—aisle five, cereals— where the honeyed light fall softly on him— and her. The way he cradles Cheerioson the cart’s edge—firm in his handsso if they slip, they fallinto the safety of the cart,into the touch of his little girl-—lets her knowhe once belonged to…
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Whoppers
WhoppersI keep the malted milk orbnestled inside my cheek,waiting for the next film cut—this Hershey-forged planet,slowly spinning toward legend,its lacquered chocolate shellwhispering to my molars,then sliding past my throat,down the cathedral of my gut,until my bowels, reverent and ready,release the myth in a soft, brown comet.I was watching—Odysseus Rex: The Iliad Reckoning—the inferior parody of…
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KFC Nocturne with Drive-In Fugue
KFC Nocturne with Drive-In FugueBack when Kentucky Fried Chickencame only in Original Recipe—before Extra Crispy,before the Colonel turned cartoon—and Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan, and Ghidrahruled the Drive-Ins in rubber vestments—my mother packed us four kids and mystepdad into that yellow Chrysler Newport,its trunk already echoing with chicken bonesand the breath of last week’s feast.We drove toward…
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Prayers Between Us
I do my laundryin the rhythm of my mother’s prayers—each crease a rosary,folding divineto divine.I count the timesher perils met mine—with hands that trembledat my fever,hands burntin a kitchenunseen,List the register of her and mine shared frailties:the way we flinched at sudden joy, unsure it would stay,All the letters written to my heart—the notes she…
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Sanctuary
SanctuaryThey sit on a stone bench in the sanctuarypressed against the highway’s edge—listening to bird songs intertwine overheadin this cage of golden mesh,five blocks long and ten stories high.One is blind, the other legless.The blind one, wearing his old army jacket—the replacement for the one torn to shreds in the flash—tilts his head to the…
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The Eulogy I Couldn’t Give
The eulogy I couldn’t give to my mother at her funeral I gave to my father at his celebration of life.It was a sentimental piece I shaped more for comfort than truth,imagining him— the first ghost to cross the thresholdof the house I bought in a new subdivisionstill raw with fresh pavement and silence—where I…
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Quiet Remittance
Quiet RemittanceI didn’t follow my father’s instructions this time.I just tucked his ashes into my inner coat pocket,where they warmed me with the good memoriesof pregame paella feasts and watching the Hurricanes,in the built over old Orange Bowl now Miami Marlins Stadium.All the anesthesiologists, the lawyers, his employees—his old crew—performed his scattering script line by…
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You
You Sometimes in my dreams I touch the body of another woman— not my mother, or my wife, not anyone I’ve known or seen. She’s a woman of first times and seasons natural and unnatural, who tells me ghost stories filled with un-lived truths that arise not from soil and sky, stories seen in a…
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The Box My Mother Kept
The Box My Mother KeptI find her in a boxlabeled “Misc.”full of not-miscellaneous things:wrinkled receipts—pollo, jabón, stamps from the 70’s and 80’s,movie ticket stubs to matinee rom-coms—each neatly placed under curled daisy petals.Birthday cards with crooked suns,one written by my six-year-old selfin tortured handwriting trying to be tender:“Te amo, Mamá”in Sharpie and crayon.A drawing of…