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Two poems by Alan Chazaro

Alan Chazaro

credit: Romain Gille
credit: Romain Gille

On Being Evicted from Earth

I’m not convinced I should be leaving, but I’ve already left. Between moons I’ve become displaced, the dance of lost tectonics. Maybe that’s why I move silently beneath the floor. Maybe that’s why I’ve let go. Let’s agree to disagree. I’ve never been able to walk a straight path. It’s not simply defiance; it’s that I’ve been raised on a different axis. Not everything is parallel but I find pleasure in perpendiculars. I can’t remember the last time we argued but it must’ve tasted like candy in a child’s cavity. This doesn’t mean something is wrong. It’s more like waking up to learn the blue sky is still blue. Who wants to find crookedness in the arrangement of their clouds? It hasn’t rained in Neo California for years. I wonder if that should alarm us. I’m insensitive to the sensitivity of certain ethers. I feel the space around me like an astronaut floating the dark. Today I told my wife that the blood of this soil rushes our veins. I meant it. I’d like to know what’s more powerful than the both of us listening to ourselves while wandering the city of our past. We can barely afford our native planet but we will make a home for ourselves in the hands of another god. We will not push each other in a direction besides going into our own flesh. It’s time to go. What happens on earth will remain with the glaciers.

Alternate Universe Ending #2

In this version I am riding an all-black
single-gear bike along Lakeshore Ave

near my apartment, and a cadenza
of dusk is singing a nearby family

of trees into a deep chorus of green
that can only be described

as baptismal, as if
our bodies might be simply

and impossibly loosened
into a wild dance of light-

shadows, and in this moment
I am taken by a bloom of faces

around me, and I cannot tell if I am
pedaling forward or being pulled

on a string, and if there is a string
how it must stretch from far beyond

wherever this concrete ends, towards
some incredible galaxy I have no business

entering because I am no cosmonaut, and I am
unsuited for this, and I am just a boy who watched

too much Star Wars growing up. And how if I go too far
past what I know, it might unravel me.

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Alan Chazaro

Alan Chazaro is the author of This Is Not a Frank Ocean Cover Album (Black Lawrence Press, 2019) and the forthcoming Piñata Theory (Black Lawrence Press, 2020). Based in Mexico, he writes a monthly column, Pocho Boy Meets World, that explores literary voices throughout Latin America. His work has recently been published in Palette, Bold Italic, Alien Magazine, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Find him on Twitter @alan_chazaro.

Author: Alan Chazaro Category: Poetry March 6, 2020

Comments

  1. ann stockdale says

    March 12, 2020 at 9:10 am

    We are all astronauts today. Good that we can still breathe under water. XO

    Reply

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Empty Mirror

Established in 2000 and edited by Denise Enck, Empty Mirror is an online literary magazine that publishes new work each Friday.

Each week EM features several poems each by one or two poets; reviews; critical essays; visual art; and personal essays.

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