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Jonathan Moya Nov 2019
Everything is a continuous white line
that goes on forever to the horizon
where the  next dream is always ahead.

Just you and the mustang
a body and a machine
moving through space and time.

Drive like you mean it.
Drive hard.
Drive tight.

The Mustang is a wild bronco
not wanting to be tamed,
just unleashed- and all the cowboy
can do is hang on for the ride.

The highway is a ***** slick *****,
eight miles of grit, passion, pride
and wild love that rides hotter
the wetter she gets.

At one point she becomes
weightless, disappears, and
the only things that matters
is who you are.
Jonathan Moya Nov 2019
The stars on the flag started falling off
when Private Walker returned home
to Tennessee after six months of being
in country in Afghanistan.

At Camp Leatherneck on the treadmill
he folded five points to pentagrams,
imagined fireworks nova his welcome back.

The flag rarely flapped in the arid silence
of base camp.  Was MIA everywhere else.

He landed unmet in
Chattanooga on Veterans Day
in time to catch the parade highlights,
which happened two days earlier,
being ignored on the airport monitors  
in the hustle of terminal traffic.

No flags decorated Broad street shops,
no watchers waived the red, white and blue.
Police motorcycles fronted the parade
and patrolled the back in sunglass alert.

Two Vietnam vets shouldering hunting rifles
marched grimly in parade formation followed
by alternating school bands and ROTC cadets.

All two thousand stars dripped down,
faded blue in the rush to show the next ad.
Every which way he looked
the rushing crowd turned his back to him.

He remembered Anousheh, the girl
whose name meant everlasting/immortal.

The child who hugged him,
kissed his forehead when he gave
her a Hershey bar from
his mom’s care package
while patrolling the base perimeter road.

The friend, the daughter, the grandchild
who died in a Taliban wedding bombing,
one week after her seventh birthday,
three days after their embrace.

His heart, his tears, his breath,
his every word was Anousheh.
All was and will be forever Anousheh.

And when he prayed
he prayed like Anousheh,
and on his knees at the airport
he faced her outbound heart
and prayed for a mutilated world.
Jonathan Moya Nov 2019
Stella remembers when  
the Zeros flew thru her backyard
and she saw Pearl Harbor in flames,
blue bodies bouncing on the waves.

Afterward, welders melted
the steel of capsized destroyers
hoping to rescue any
upside down survivors.

Her Billy drafted six months before
would fly Wildcats in the Marshall Islands
and in the Coral Seas never losing a gunner.

At Midway he launched from the Enterprise,
into a fury of collapsing sea foam and mist
part of the 233 fighter planes of
the sleeping giant squadron
filed with a terrible resolve.

The Zero bullets ricocheted
around the open back cabin
and Billy heard the loud groan
and Mike fall asleep as he
flew  on through the fog
of exploding red mushrooms.

He returned safely home to Stella
wrapped in metals and the flag.
She knew from that day that
Zeros would darken her every sky.
Jonathan Moya Nov 2019
The earlier horror leaves DT  
a broken drunken man
building smaller worlds within worlds,
boxes within boxes,
memories within smaller memories
to keep the monsters from eating
the shining he has left.

He is forever moving
to the same room
with different people.

“We are all dying”, he thinks,
“The world is one big hospice
with fresh air.”

The calico cat jumps on his bed,
sensing it’s time for the long dream.

“Nothing to be scared off, it’s just sleep,”
are his last thoughts as he
fondles his sobriety chip before
meeting his father in their shared dark.

The man takes a drink.
The drink takes a drink.
The drink takes the man.

In his dreams the world is full of
superheroes, vampires and redrum
reflecting backwards in the mirror.

He doesn’t end.
He just flys away.
Heaven is full of the shining.
Jonathan Moya Nov 2019
In the rear view mirror
he can see the specters..
  
her upside down reflection
scatter when a foot
hits the puddle…

hear the notes
of a trumpet solo
popping thru the
open red door
of a jazz club…

remembers when they
whacked his partner…

and left their
footprints on his ribs..  

left his mouth
out of joint…

wounded,
in love with that
woman in the blue dress
holding him in her arms…

asking her if there
is anything else
he should know..

because she is
a major part
of the mystery…
Jonathan Moya Nov 2019
1.
The biggest tree exists
to neither swing nor sway,
doesn’t wait for a strong wind
to emancipate it from roots,
to be turned into freedom papers
to be torn up by the master.

The swing was created by the master,
to exist until the limb snaps and
the sway of blood to earth
arises in a song of liberation,
that listens for the river,
follows the stream of scars
flowing down that no slave
can ever escape or runaway from.

2.

The river casts her gently onto the banks.
She vomits its water onto the soil
fearful the scent will call the bloodhounds,
the white man’s brown and black animal
bred to hunt the runaway slave.
She huddles and shivers in the rain.

She recalls her master’s words:
“Having a favorite slave
is like having a favorite pig.
One day you will have to
sell it, eat it and forgets it’s name.”

Which is the greater sin against God,
she wonders, suicide or slavery?

She feels the rising sun
filtering through her fingers
in front of her and knows
she will walk alone
100 miles to freedom.
The good friend of the slave:
The Angel of Death is at her back.

She will go underground
and her enemies
will call her Moses.

She will cast Araminta Ross,
her old slave name, onto the waters.
Harriet Tubman will be
forever her free one.
Her adopted children
will not be born
into the stink of fear
and running for their lives.

3.
She falls into a God spell
that allows her to find
a way for every black soul
to forge the river,
make each crossing a baptism.

She now knows that freedom
means losing love but
finding your greater cause,
that the price of freedom is
watching people die,
watching people live
and breathe unbounded air.
Jonathan Moya Nov 2019
The bulldozers and jackhammers
blasted the concrete away
clearing it of water, aggregate, cement,
tearing it down to the soil
until it buzzed with reclamation,
smelled of loam and petrichor,
the release of geosmin in the stirring,
ozone expelling with first lightning and rain,
surface bubbles releasing aerosols
like fresh baked bread from the oven
through open kitchen windows.


Over the watchful hum of drones
circling overheard the first crop
of the community garden
was tilled and planted in nine wide rows-
beans, cucumbers, zucchini, pumpkin,
squash, melons, clover, mint and basil-
drawing only the attention of hornets,
the disinterest of the rain god
that let their tender love dissolve
back to the earth in a pool of rot,
that never allowed a harvesting or tasting.

The second crops were planted in five narrow rows:
tomatoes, peanuts, green peppers, sweet peas
and eggplants, offensive to wasps and immune
to the silly whims of an offended deity
that could not flood over their high walls,
their collective pride, red as clotted blood.
They reaped its first beautiful harvest,
thought it tasted of airy summer dreams,
sold it with joy in their farmer’s market
until the first secret taste spit it out
for it was nothing but sawdust and glue.
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