Quota For All Things Soon Fading

That fawn
would be
like love
only… leveling some field
with hope on my breath
old bones
around the root of the body
gone wrong
and my teeter god dazed
yes, heaven is a vanity event
the feathers cut more than skin
collect memories
in nondescript jars
angry fathers smashed when we were young
and yet I want to lay at your mercy
hand upon me
let it pool up beneath strewn Polaroids
this gift of not being – I wager the fawn is more than metaphor
motel light, carbon footprints
in snow
I copy your dark into my hope
but the dust – that I earned
pulled from my pockets
like earth
my knees, my heart, my muscles filled up with scars
signals over the hill
when I can’t sleep
I pray into my window
more flawed than Gaia
I don’t speak words
I stutter
and I lean hard…

James Diaz is the author of This Someone I Call Stranger (2018, Indolent Books) and editor of the forthcoming anthology What Keeps us Here: Songs from The Other Side of Trauma. In 2016 he founded the online literary arts and music journal Anti-Heroin Chic to provide a platform for often unheard voices, including those struggling with addiction, mental illness and Prison/confinement. He resides in upstate New York, in between balanced rocks and horse farms. He has never believed in anything as strongly as he does the power of poetry to help heal a shattered life. Read other articles by James.