Lisa Alvarez
Nine Line Cento for Now
I say it plain
it is not the end of the world
the alphabet was not just theirs
hope is the thing with feathers
There’s bluebird in my heart that
is at a funeral
There’s an ancient, ancient garden that I see sometimes in dreams
of elders, fools and willows
Oh to follow the road that leads away from everything
*
Lines from Langston Hughes,”Let America Be America Again”; Nayyirah Waheed, “if someone”; Sharon Olds, “Ode of Girl’s Things”; Emily Dickinson, “’Hope’ is the thing with feathers”; Charles Bukowski, “Bluebird”; Sonia Vatomsky, “Rhotic Asphyxiation”; H.P. Lovecraft, “A Garden”; Patricia Smith, “Katrina”; Pablo Neruda, “Almost Out of the Sky.”
Lisa Alvarez’s poetry and prose have appeared most recently in in Faultline, Huizache, Los Angeles Times, Santa Monica Review, Truthdig, and Zocalo Public Square, as well as in the anthologies Sudden Fiction Latino: Short-Short Stories from the United States and Latin America (W. W. Norton & Company, 2010), edited by Robert Shapard, James Thomas, and Ray Gonzales; and Only Light Can Do That: 100 Post-Election Poems, Stories & Essays (The Rattling Wall and PEN Center USA, 2017), edited by Michelle Franke. Alvarez earned an MFA in fiction from the University of California, Irvine, and has taught creative writing and composition for 25 years at a community college in Orange County.
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