by Emma Trelles

2017, 2018, 2019, 2020

And sparrows unthread nests, bring their young nothing

And shadows best seen inside the pitch of a cave

And three men stabbed on a train because of courage

And jacarandas flick cinder and blacken the ground

And the harbor horn is a creature roping hulls to the reefs

And the reefs gleam with chrome and absence

And absence is welcome

The bullet is welcome

The malignant cell is welcome

The gray faces and their merciless tongues are welcome

And a father is reptilian in his regard. And a mother stitches

Her lips like a wound. And the wound smells of silence and its blaring

And a child lays hands on a mine. And a man swallows his lies without measure

And a woman is told she is less than him she is less than the bodies left

Behind, less than the unmade, the never-was, the dirt forgotten by the tracks

And I no longer care about the losses. I no longer care if the last

Bit of bark is stripped from the earth, if the starved possum survives

The road, whether my neighbor coughs blood while she drags off a red

Or the hand turning the knob means me harm. I no longer fear

The inexorable diagnosis, the oceans rising to such heights

In my dreams they are monstrous but we are all still running

Towards each other, in this latest hour, refusing to shutter our eyes.


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Emma Trelles is the daughter of Cuban immigrants and the author of Tropicalia (University of Notre Dame Press), winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, a finalist for Foreword/Indies poetry book of the year, and a recommended read by The Rumpus. She is currently writing a second book of poems, Courage and the Clock. Her work has been anthologized in Verse Daily, Best American Poetry, Best of the Net, Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity, and others. Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in Salt, Zócalo Public Square, the Colorado Review, Spillway, and the Miami Rail. A CantoMundo Fellow and a recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, she lived and worked for many years as an arts journalist in South Florida and now lives with her husband in California, where she teaches at Santa Barbara City College and curates the Mission Poetry Series.