My life as a fallen star
Maybe it was the way the light worked its way into everything when you were too young to work out the dark from the not-so-dark. The way even your father’s pain glowed some nights. A tree could only take you so far up, and it always hurt on the way down. You couldn’t know the terrible thing until it happened, till it became your life. You were hungry, then, in that way children have of always being hungry, but worse, there really was nothing to eat. In between the spirit and your ribcage, southern stars were dying out, one by one. You thought ‘this must be it, the whole goddamn story’. Cornfield, tobacco barn, poverty, pain. Pain. It wasn’t all you felt, but it was there beneath everything else you felt. One day the light wasn’t there. The field was dark, your father was dark, your mother was a felled tree on the moon. Kid, listen, cause this part is important; you didn’t have a choice. You couldn’t get what you needed here, and so you did the terrible thing. A gun, crossing the highway, waiting till there were no more cars parked in front of the convenient store, it was all a blur. One minute you were there, the next, you were gone. Two years gone. Strange mercy, this. Now you were well cared for, behind walls you couldn’t get to the other side of. You could trust this. It was real. When they held you to the floor and stuck the needle in, you said “thank you”. Thank you. The light was gone for a long time. You don’t know how long. Long enough. Then you’d notice little things, like how your heart was growing larger, not smaller. How none of it had turned you mean. How it smoothed you over and opened you up. You couldn’t know this then, kid, but it all had to happen. To get to here you had to go to there. The sharpest edge of it all, and I know, you almost didn’t return to us. But that’s the thing about life, it’s only when you’ve gone too far that you can come back. The things that change you hurt the most. And then they become bigger than everything else that has ever happened to you. It happened. To you. That’s the way the light works itself into everything eventually. Your father doesn’t glow now, and your mother is still shipwrecked on the moon. But you glow a little bit now, on the inside, and you call this Earth your home. The thing is; you can’t write better endings for the people that you love. Because this, this has always been your story.
The Story Doesn’t Change, You Do
and it happens like most things happen
while you’re busy with something else
the way it shifts its weight to another foot
so you don’t go numb
like how my mother threatens us all with her death
yet again
and I know I never could save her
not as a child, not as an adult
and so I surrender her
to the pile in the backyard
to the moon raking over the water
to the dim light of my father
and the death rattle of the pipe in my brother’s mouth
I am North,
they are South
the story stays the same
only we’re a little different
we were always bound to lose them
one way or another
you can’t make anyone want anything
and that’s just a fact
like the fat on the bone
we’re not hardwired
we’re just
a little hard
to reach
sometimes.
Henry and Margaret (Ode to Autumn)
“Henry, do you love me?”
“What’s not to love, dear?”
he’s burning leaves
humming into things
heavenly;
what you lose track of
the sum total of light
in the backyard
twisting in the wind
like pure church in a glass
everything beautiful deferred for so long
now here it is
it’s funny how seamlessly seasons change
makes you thirsty for it
“Henry, do you remember when we first met?
You said that I reminded you of the moon.”
“I remember dear.”
The air chilly
and gathering dark
there is some kind of forever here
though you cannot see it when you’re standing in it
love is a wild moon tonight
smell of dirt and driftwind
and it is all right here
and now.
Prayer, Friends
There’s a moment
Just before you’ve finished gathering the days ends together
When the sun says;
‘I am going down now’
And you think; yeah, me too
And later that night
Which night?
All the nights my dear
The sound of laughter carries itself louder than pain
Down the hall
Not always
I know
But tonight
For the purpose of a poem
A prayer
Why not
This laughter located just beneath everything that went wrong today
I hope you know that I will still love you tomorrow
All the morrows
And the march of tides
As they winter the road with slippery conditions
If ever you doubted a friend was as good as a prayer
Listen
Let the laughter
Play itself out
It’s not always
As bad
As we need it to be.
James Diaz is the author of This Someone I Call Stranger (Indolent Books, 2018) as well as the founding editor of Anti-Heroin Chic. Their poems have appeared in Yes, Poetry, Gone Lawn, The Collidescope and Thimble Literary Magazine. They live by the simple but true motto that “feelings matter,” every shape and size of feeling. They believe that every small act of kindness makes an often unseen but significant difference in someone’s life and hope that their poems are a small piece of that.
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