They stand behind wooden panels cut in flowered honeycombs,
fingers quicksilver and voices sea-foams
They are ghosts of babies lost in shame
A beauty of sound but grotesquely mishappen,
Fiery muses no judging eyes could tame

He is somewhere in the church, conducting,
Prowling through the orphanage, inducting,
Searching for girls who can conjure the sky
With blood in their music and songs in their veins
A kind of musician no lire can buy.

He walks through the fields under...

“Javier! Apúrate, wey!”

Daniél is barely visible. 

“Ya voy!”

I know I have to help herding the livestock, but I just want to run off deep into the territory with Daniél and saddle up the horses, cut up tunas, catch lizards, do stupid shit together. 

“Why are you such a little shit, yelling at me? Don’t you see me coming?”

“Well yeah, but you’re slow as a mule, Javi. Come on, Chuy has Geronimo and Berta ready for us.”

Daniél...

You are the warmth that comes from a sunrise on a bitterly cold morning, and you are the rain-clouds that cut through the heat. You are the first magnolia bloom, the first maple leaf to redden, the wobbly first step of a newborn foal. You are a tritone and a cacophony, a perfect and a euphony, a ball of yarn without a tangle, a piano key that does not stick. You are the bite of black coffee and the silk...

Little bird, where do you wander?
Do you dream of your oak tree yonder,
Where the smells were warm and 
The leaves let in the lights of autumn through their skins of stained glass

Little bird, what storm robbed thee?
From what tempest do you flee,
Rancorous winds that tore at your feathers and
Pulled at your glass bones and discarded you in the deep

Little bird, what must you do?
Drifting through a net of blue,
Picking at the...

They stand behind wooden panels cut in flowered honeycombs,
White-veiled women, abandoned as babies, thrown from their homes
They are ugly and misshapen, but nobody knows,
For voices of glass and quick, plucky fingers
Make their magic, hidden, from treacle a rose.

He is somewhere in the church, conducting,
Prowling through the orphanage, inducting,
Searching for girls who can conjure the sky
With blood in their music and songs in their veins
A kind of musician no lire can buy.
...

Now that I am older I assumed I had always loved myself,
Curly baby hairs and brown eyes,
But I was wrong.
I remembered days where my friends would tell me that my hair was black
And I would fight, endlessly, that my hair was dark brown, and that look! When the sun hits it in just the right way, there are red highlights. 
I hated my hair, the hair that wouldn’t stay, the hair that preferred to lift up...

I did not know it yet, that afternoon in the crowded cafeteria,
But I saw a figure, wandering through the masses of music

I did not know it yet, sitting across from you, squinting because the sun was in my eyes,
And you rose up in your seat and the light broke and fell on the sides of your face, sun god

They speak bitter about you-
And I want to listen, because my trust is a dusty relic, breakable,...

Where green are the meadows and fresh is the breath
Where once there was gray and the damp smell of death
Where flowers dance in the arms of the rain
Where she danced with him that night, in vain;
For she was in love, but not with the man
Who had a good standing and had a good name,
But had no plays left in a bright-eyed youth’s game

She was in love with the wind through the grass
And...

On that day, the moon became enamored with the man who lived by the creek and his white-hawk woman. It was like a current of hot air carried by cool nocturnal breathing, ethereal, celestial, a pause in time found and lost and forgotten in the currency of distant hills, where the little wolves learn to catch rodents. The moon was keen, this way. Always in love; a tight orb in the inner reaches of human emotion. After that day of...