James Diaz- Three Poems

Cecilia, why aren't you laughing?

Push me

and I will edge open

along my spine

where the nerve of storm

falls along the wide expanse

of meadow and wet marsh

this is an absurd way

to get to know someone

but let's burn this bar to the ground

and roast marshmallows 

over its middle-of-the-night demise

and if the shadow of laughter

hails outward with its caustic contralto

into the valley along peace river

where winter will have buried the details of our crime

slap me hard in the face

and tell me that it was for my own good.

Men's Recovery House

My roommate Tony took me out to dinner

my first night at the halfway house

on that piece of shit side ways street

in nowhere Kentucky

there were I don't know how many

of us crazy sons of bitches

trying to find our salvation

in 12 easy steps

not so easy really

but Tony was my hero

the guy's life had turned around

and when he spoke people listened

and he had seen more battle ground than most of us

there was a certain poetry to the man

and being so new to this whole recovery thing

that dinner he bought me meant a lot to me

I didn't have much then

but Tony, he made me feel like I belonged

and I'd never really felt like I belonged anywhere

I looked up to him, hung on to his every word

it just made sense to,

so when he came into the room at 2 am

with a zip-lock bag full of nickels, dimes and pennies

high as fuck, and our eyes locked in the dead of that dead night

I felt a part of my soul crawl down into my stomach

and I wept in my mind

because I knew it was over

and because I knew that I would never feel that way again

like I belonged, like things could get better

and that not every one in this run down world

had to be so full of shit all of the time.

Not so easy really. 

12 little steps, but what if half of them were missing?

Cross Forms Of Errant Travel

The water weighs almost nothing

against a word so mutant

so on the run from the impossible

germ of before and after

the hope unravels

a fever and the threshold of another person

standing in the shadow

of what comes when you least expect it

across this border you are experiencing

a death before death

listening for the sound a pattern makes

through an open door

how a familiar smell can transport you

how the node of the memory looms

in the corner where the light fades

and you kiss your losses on the mouth.

Author Bio: James Diaz spends his time writing poetry as if his life depended on it, because it does. His forms of survival can be found in Ditch, Calliope, Cheap Pop Lit, Pismire, Collective Exile, My Favorite Bullet, and The Idiom. Do not follow him. He does not like to lead.