James Diaz
Left Arm
the smallest vein
was dust you could not mouth
someone else’s light
fireside infancy
like a blue cry
on a black wall
I thought; death deals in specifics,
it’s only life that is vague
taking its sweet ass time
cat over mouse
fist over scar
this is the story that i carved onto my left arm
impossible to forget
the body
the damage
you learn to love inside a storm
but what you cannot remember is who you were before
they destroyed so many acres of you
wintered again, how skin flakes through the amber yellow light
in a long hall of bad dreams
you turn to meet your maker
your mother, your failer
counter gift the strange hurt with a howling mercy
forgive, forget, remember
bitter starling stuck inside a hole
this will always hurt
my left arm reads.
James Diaz is the author of This Someone I Call Stranger (Indolent Books, 2018) and editor of the forthcoming anthology What Keeps us Here: Songs from The Other Side of Trauma (Anti-Heroin Chic Press, 2018). In 2016 he founded the online literary arts and music journal Anti-Heroin Chic to provide a platform for often unheard voices, including those struggling with addiction, mental illness and Prison/confinement. He resides in upstate New York, in between balanced rocks and horse farms. He has never believed in anything as strongly as he does the power of poetry to help heal a shattered life.
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