James Diaz is the founding editor of the literary arts & music journal Anti-Heroin Chic. His work has appeared most recently in Psaltery & Lyre, The Ekphrastic Review, Quail Bell Magazine, and HIV Here & Now. He is the author of This Someone I Call Stranger (Indolent Books, 2018) and currently resides in upstate New York.
No Coming Back From This
By James Diaz
“Sometimes the heart gets to talkin’ too much” -Malcolm Holcombe
Darling,
come in from the rain
all that
useless travel
this has to stop
quarter moon
broken
and hunkered
into bad light
be heavy
when you need
to clear paths
pack the pictures away
get missing,
when the hours eat into your
little secular hell
how come the distance
between here and there
keeps growing?
skin never shedding—
beer money / please okay me
it is so cheap here on the floor
I am not the thing I thought I would be
all wrong / bruised arms
satellite glows like whooping cough
against hills too high to climb
packing heat
in hard spot motels
say I had the worst luck
of anyone you ever knew,
would that vindicate me?
dry lipped
end of the road
phantom
whispering broken prayers
into my shirt sleeve
nothing can save us
from ourselves
there is no disaster so complete
you can’t always find a little more.
This packs heat! Thanks for sharing it.
HGL