The words were easy to write,
even with young hands,
even the letters to my father
about the hurricane or
the collapse
of a house
the trapping
of bodies.
the legs swinging
from a tree.
They were about yesterdays,
the what
fell,
the what
struck,
the who
died.
My father said it was the reading
that suffocated, that words
that came from brown sugar countries
were so raw that you had to take
a deep breath
before opening an envelope,
that you had to
dive into words
with eyes ready
to slam onto concrete,
that you had to read them as if
they were the piece of paper
keeping you separated
from the arms of your family.
José B. González is the author of the poetry collections Toys Made of Rock and When Love Was Reels, and the co-editor of Latino Boom: An Anthology of US Latino Literature. A Pushcart Prize Winner, he has been anthologized in the Norton Introduction to Literature and has published his work in such journals as Boston Review, Callaloo, Huizache, Pilgrimage, and Connecticut River Review. His third poetry collection, Tongue Wrapped in Twine, from which the two poems in this issue appear, will be published by FlowerSong Press in 2025. A Fulbright Scholar, he is the founder and editor of LatinoStories.com.
