by Danny Rivera

 

In these first after-hours, while waiting for you beneath an olive tree
and lifting veils from our creased faces, the repeated shelling signals

the opening of another day: here is the battering, with their weapons,
launched deeply, forming a splintered arc into midafternoon;

there we find an oculus in the ceiling of the hospital, a gradual light
exposing a hand, open to the sky, extending from the rubble.

There is no music, or the striking of bells now, on the balcony.
Even the newspapers speak of absence, so familiar: Do you remember

being thrown into the sea, a casualty made and remade? Elsewhere,
on the handwritten note left behind, the broken scrawl of time:

the highlighted word, grief, arrives from the French, grever, to burden,
a reminder of the sudden weight before us. We now need an updated

list of the missing and the infirm, the restless and itinerant, a series
of names on walls, undone. Let us pray for more light to enter

the poem. Let us pray that every word from the acid-mouth carries
meaning; no words carry meaning when every voice is a conflagration.

It is like that first summer, when a bird, stunned and disoriented,
flew into the same house from which we were attempting to escape.

Perhaps this is how other animals fail to reach for language, express
a need. Perhaps this is how the body, forever this diminishing frame,

like history grinding into itself, continues to live without its own eyes.

 

 

 

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Danny Rivera is the author of a poetry chapbook, Ancestral Throat (Finishing Line Press, 2021), and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Washington Square Review, Epiphany, Superstition Review, and other journals. He received an MFA in Creative Writing from the City College of New York. Web: dannyrivera.co | Bluesky: @snareshot.bsky.social | Twitter: @snareshot | Instagram: @snareshot_.