The world we came from
A cylinder of tremble
husked wind bark-
that space where your childhood home
found its word crossed out-
an artifact of shadow
the incongruity of a mothers motive,
a land of diffuse place
where ruin bleeds the bone
The margin of error-
what you heard: people are aloof by default,
ahead of their promises,
innocence turning its love over
a watery sense event
cottonwood unlit
color considering time by the length
of what doesn't show
surface wears its scar like
a fault line
this world of invisible mountain
between the trace
of losses
letting memory go
in the wild rush of wind,
spirit reordering the anticipation of light by necessity.
The stuff of small towns
There is no contingency
things just sort of lean into themselves
borrowing sugar from a kind neighbor
yes, our spirits are broken
it was a gift we received from birth
there is waiting and there is roaming
interplay of a deep dangerous climb
like a house in rain
I turn my cheek towards the textile of memory
I hear the morning wisp across the threshold
a rope line leading to the navel masks a serenade
I have sight and I don't know what to do with it
see a thing as it is
or lie down in traffic recounting all of the injuries done to me
underneath my breath
that girl is a tornado town
there is haystack in her soul
there is intellect meeting the spirit
there is that hard, violent shove that your history teacher gave you
out of the door of his classroom and into the hall
how you couldn't cry because you knew that this was a glimpse of things to come
of the kind of world you would be living in
from now on.
The song of missing root
I've tried very hard
to be more sincere,
but such specific little
graces are not always afforded us,
when you bend over
the way heat is pressed indissolubly
into the concrete-
not knowing why,
as if materials were married to each other
by our own unknowing.
Under tone
rattles sea
if sleeping in garbage is your thing
walk with someone else's smile
lip synced in abnormal blue
attack passersby, I know you man,
it was a place the two of us
were born in.
Tear down palace
night
hawk is where we stood
a word made of wood
woven into amnesia, this land
carries us with out water
stabbing, kicking, putting us out
on our asses when we need
almost everything,
due you, nothing,
it's hello then
to the terrible brotherhood of the world,
debt is the price
transferred into the palm of the poem.
Now morning. Now warm hands
by the heat of the grill.
Our daily bread.
If that.
James Diaz lives in upstate New York. His poems and stories have appeared in Chronogram, Ditch, Cheap Pop Lit, Pismire, Epigraph, and Collective Exile.