James Diaz
The Lonely Crossing
Esmeralda squints into the sun
her mother’s bones rising up
from the darkest river inside her
long nights lost on back roads going nowhere
‘dying things, what they call us’
someone says, in the back of a rusty ford—
she just spits and thinks of all the temporary pens
they make for horses
too old to run the distance
and postcards of places in dreams
and how the flesh is always more tired than the eyes
Chiapas ghost-kids
calling out
for an impossible flint/sized answer
from a never-home-God
over the great white spume
day work / night fugue / waiting / wanting
‘call me gone one more time,’ she thinks but does not say,
‘and I will burn this town down’
‘don’t look at me as if I was already dead
and only you know it,
Goddammit, I know too,
I know too.’
James Diaz is the author of This Someone I Call Stranger (Indolent Books, 2018). He lives by the simple but true motto that “feelings matter” every shape and size of feeling. He believes that every small act of kindness makes an often unseen but significant difference in someone’s life and hopes that his poems are a small piece of that.
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