Iliana Rocha

Hero’s Journey

The junkyard hush of suburbia. Another man tripped & fell

dead into boyhood,

into concrete’s archaic spank, force of 1,000 mothers.

No one found his body for hours, & while my father pared

back the blooming pears

in the name of not having a favorite, petals drifted onto

the body in soft, but strange

seconds. Like all men in my life, what else fenced him in, kept

him drunk & thrashing against wood, I wonder. His heart,

an open container with a small

puddle of backwash & blood, rolling around the floorboards

for decades, over & over an oh-so

familiar emptiness, tongue-&-grooved. Dad says that’s called

being a man. Death, the precedent of precedent, the neighbor’s

dog followed because she said she couldn’t

handle more than one grief at a time. Grief distracts in the manner

of its glitter, as if our backyards weren’t already

green & silver. I want to peek over into the square of another ache,

where, I guess you could say, the rubber met the road.

I Steal from Everyone

A man behind the wheel, a cigarette between

his long fingers. All I ask is, don’t

make me go with you to your

round, blue world, going down your throat

& dissolving. Instead, I reach out

the window for a telephone pole

I steal & swallow. Stiff eucharist.

Someone else stole from New Orleans,

her cheeks glittering like the river, humidity

wrangling her curls & the dandelion

stalks as her body lay undiscovered for days.

Trees waved defeat with their sad strands of leftover

metallic beads. The Garden District

none too proud, except of its mausoleums.

I want someone to steal from me the slap

& punch, the act of staring

at a grave you see yourself step out of.

You say, Jesus is so familiar, I can picture

him in drag, & I stole that line from somewhere

else, while a rosary on the rearview

steals from those that claim to be

religious, with its little movement right & left

like a finger wagging, No. Nuh uh.

Counting lights can’t keep you awake

tonight, & you need something else

from a nose-diving bottle to chug, an airplane

trying to erase where it’s been by flying backward.

You say, in a moment you will

know everything you want—& you’ve stolen

that too—as if in the passenger’s seat

I was like a canary, perched on a stool fingering

a strand of pearls, a too small, too

scared a creature—

Emily Pittinos