by Jessica Cuello

What if your name is not yours
but the absent father, a stranger

written on your worksheet,
a glyph on your face

carried through the halls
of West Street Elementary

where the teachers gaze
out the great glass doors longingly,

perpetual pale light at either end,
and you carry a giant French Horn,

the school’s horn on loan,
its swirl a beautiful coil of gold

opening like a bell and it calls to you
though it is heavy

bigger than you
and you stop every block to rest

to change hands and deep inside
the case the dark velvet form

holds the instrument
and you are quiet as survival

walking dreamlike
past the crossing guard

on a street you think of
as your journey

because you walk alone
and everything that happens to you

happens on this route
between name and apartment,

the grey one that leans
sideways and gets Condemned

in a pale paper
pasted over a window

and when you live there
you listen through the walls,

your whole body an ear,
and though you quit later

because you have
the wrong embouchure

and don’t practice enough,
the horn glints

behind your shoulder
in silent wait.


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Jessica Cuello’s most recent book is Yours, Creature (JackLeg Press, 2023). Her book, Liar, was selected by Dorianne Laux for The 2020 Barrow Street Book Prize. Cuello is the recipient of a 2023 NYSCA Artist Grant and is poetry editor at Tahoma Literary Review. She teaches French in Central NY.

by Jessica Cuello

I turned five years old
forty years ago and sat
on the back steps waiting
for my father for a visit

Waiting for his last visit
my back to the house
on the gravel steps
where the railing rusted

loose in the cement rusted
off and the house was
condemned When the landlord
died the metal and gravel crumbled

back into earth crumbled
into dust except the basement
stayed behind still intact
Even in the ancient

world outlines of ancient
houses stay Tourists kneel
on the ground to touch the sites
Mostly they make a single visit

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Jessica Cuello is the author of Hunt (The Word Works, 2017) and Pricking (Tiger Bark Press, 2016). She has been awarded The 2017 CNY Book Award, The 2016 Washington Prize, The New Letters Poetry Prize, a Saltonstall Fellowship, and The New Ohio Review Poetry Prize. New poems can be found or are forthcoming in American Literary Review, On the Seawall, Jet Fuel Review, Tinderbox, and Image. She is co-poetry editor at Tahoma Literary Review.