I’m away without you. I’m thinking of you and not
thinking of you at all. I’m speaking in a tongue
that isn’t mine but feels like it. Where to begin?
In the green waves I waited for? In the air so hot?
In the dog’s pink mouth? In the platoon of clouds
that assembles every afternoon? Better clouds
than out to sea. There is a sea I swim out into,
and sunsets, plenty of sunsets – honestly, the sky here
is amazing – and, now and again, there are swimming pools,
a man’s warm shoulder blades, birds. There are insects
and minor humiliations, sure, rituals I’ve misunderstood
and money that runs short, but that doesn’t stop me.
I join the boys standing in the street with rocks in their hands.
I sit in the cathedral built by accident. I wait for the days to pass.
I reach for you, but there is just a chair. There are names
I’ve left and names I’ve taken. There is his name –
the one we’re both thinking about. I say it, and he becomes
a termite on the bedpost. I say it, and he becomes a giant
inside the borders of a fragile country. I’m learning
how easily ruined we are, how swiftly history divides us
into the before and after.
Nico Amador is a poet, educator and community organizer living in Vermont by way of Philadelphia and San Diego. His poems have appeared in Poets Reading the News, Poet Lore, Bedfellows, Plenitude, Nimrod International Journal, APIARY Magazine, and are forthcoming in Bettering American Poetry, Vol. 3. His chapbook, Flower Wars, was selected as the winner of the Anzaldúa Poetry Prize and was published by Newfound Press in 2017. He is an alumni of The Home School and the Lambda Literary Foundation’s Writers Retreat, serves as poetry editor at Thread Makes Blanket Press and helped to co-found the Rogue Writing Workshop of Philadelphia, which provides workshop instruction with accomplished poets to those writing and learning outside of academic institutions.
