Jesse Fleming
The pueblo is an eye
Gone down Deposit Street
Gone to buy stamps
across the new bridge
Running behind the poppies
with the horses, so I'm
gone up into the hills to see them
Closed like Mar Rojo,
wide open like Mar Rojo,
and the tidy row of Helins and Fields
and Calderwoods and Almacks all packed
and the pools drained down to the dust. Soft scuff
on the white tiles in the old school with the green roof.
And Paula and Natalie and Victoria
and David and Pau and Christian
and I sat on the swings and kicked
the weeds that smelled like soaked red pads and fish.
Gone forgiving, gone remembering why
it's the rainbow land and the basura sky
and the hungry air that makes me sick
with belonging to clay
gone with bells on morning on Pascua
on military planes clanging overhead
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Jesse Fleming is a Chicago-based writer, musician and environmental justice activist. Her writing has appeared in Backstory Journal, Minnesota's Best Emerging Poets (Z Publishing, 2018), ELDERLY magazine and others. She copyedits for Haymarket Books and has done editorial work and Spanish translation for AWP and Milkweed Editions.