Tag: poetic architecture
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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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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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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…