Arizona
See, my son, how the sun
promises another chance,
without words an oath
of blood between him and the bison.
Tributes
June Is Almost Done
Nianxi Chen, born in 1970 at Danfeng, Shannxi Province, began writing poems in 1990. In 1999, he left his hometown and labored as a miner for 16 years across China. In 2015, he couldn’t continue as a miner due to occupational disease. In 2016, he was awarded the Laureate Worker Poet Prize. His poetry and life were featured in a 2018 documentary entitled Demolition Work about migrant worker poets in China.
An Old Man
An old man, stooped over the table, sits in the hubbub of a café’s middle, alone, a newspaper open before
What St. Basil Knew
Hunger is worst of all. Hunger is pain—
the worst of miseries, the worst of deaths.
A knife kills quickly; famine kills you slow—
a long & endless martyrdom that drains
a body’s heat & shrivels up its breath,
till muscle, flesh & even color go.
In the Bible No One Appears Smoking
But what if God or those who wrote the Bible
forgot to include the cigarettes
and in reality those Biblical figures
spent the day puff-puff-puffing