JAMES DIAZ

JAMES DIAZ

What Keeps Us Here

allow me

please

to pick the bones

from your hair

the lanky death knotted prayers

plasticized knees

autumn creepers

on the gas station bathroom floor

counting several hundred heavens

with finger glow

between us

the mortar

for stars

dust resin bone

raise me to you

and drink my

unknowing

my iowa dusk

eye veins thin pain

through the barely rising

crow stone

the run in the stocking

the run in the hall

shattered mirrors

Stevie, no land,

lots of slide

heave me

cut into it

to the bone

cut me down from you

I will grow thinner

like god

all girl

in my throat

heart gut

and twine

give it time

the world will end all too soon

but our bones will rise like ash

and feed the sky with bread.

Travelling By

I let the highway retry me

Changed into an off ramp river

The crow in my heart sang for mercy

It was shadow and moss

And the stations of the cross

Etched burning in my deeper wound

After this, oh love, after all this

Behind the old motel

and the stories around old John's fire,

25 will get us into heaven, a black van,

a quickie with a turnequit, god, you know if I could,

I'd chop all that wood, but I wasn't built for mercy

and it's quicker falling than it is climbing,

everything there is to love in this life

has been burned for heat

before we ever even get to it

Here's my heart

it's a rusted pipe it's a satellite prayer

here we are / in moon light / crossing

into the great blue clearing

of highway rain / bandaid dreams,

this is how we were made / broken whole

but my god, we were here.

What We're Left With

A gentle marigold heart

stuff me with light

carry me across the highway

to the old bridge

little stream

throw the big one's back in

stars not stones

oh mother, why is it so hard to talk to you

I am all rain

brittle furniture

small bones

can I be just be

not broken, okay and not mad

or confused

is this blue or red

it's all fog in my head today

I woke with bird song and ache

a marigold woven heart glowing

nothing I know helps anymore

oh mother, why is it so hard to talk these days

can we just be

not broken

can we just be okay?

How To Write A Happy Poem

When You're Not

Begin with friendship

The hollow in the moon's endless opening, a heart divisible by nothing

Other than hands holding down the branch, crossing to the river

We are all of these things

And then we are ourselves

And the light gets into everything

From this angle

When I can't,

You show me how

This is what we're made of

A heart divisible by nothing

So useless as disappearing

When the point is to show up

Tender mountain, climbed by hands searching for the next available jutt

In the rock

When you can't,

I show you how

The light stays a little longer

Each time

We climb

We climb

Back, back

to where we began

And there is no ending

When everything,

Everything

Is just beginning.

When The Going Get's Dark

We Get Darkly Going

"I hate everyone but you"

-Matthew Ryan

I know a place

in the pines

just off the highway

it is warm and full of light

it is texaco, it is gravity

it is an old man leaning on the wind

I don't know much anymore

I go willingly

I speak sparingly

there is a traffic jam, in whose heart tonight

there is tarmac and winter light slanting

against dark wind, only god

isn't answering

if I am you

and if I am not

there is earth / dark / in my bones

the questions outweigh the echo

I know, I know;

water welcomes the stone

it is getting late

where you are

& I am not

sure

how long

this wind

will hold

me up.

The place is there in my mind

I look up, we are almost home

I look again,

nothing.

There is no promise in a poem.

Simply, I had faith once.

It is always a little easier to lose your way than it is to find it.

I don't know where to end...

but I feel so close now,

to the edge,

the edge.

of mercy.

maybe. 10 more minutes wind,

just give me 10 more...

JAMES DIAZ

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 Lit Mag. 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.