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Jonathan Moya Oct 2020
It’s easy for them to slip into the ice,
the big crack of nonjudgmental water,
absorbed entirely in the joy of now.

First winter blankets them, then the frost,  
the quiet, until the last of their woolens,
the black and red squares of their scarves,
their blue and pink pompoms trailing down
become the final gender reveal, the last
memory of their life that skates grief circles
in the frozen lake of their parents’ memory.

The water will lift their lost children
back into their parents arms,
the only mercy the lake will grant them.

Some will replace the weight of
their grief with other newborns.
They will watch them put on weight,
watch them weigh them down,
always keeping their new ones
from the cold weight of water.

The rest will dream every night
of the white cloth that covered
their small and silent bodies.
They will leave a light on hoping
their children will open the door
and come home again—

not lost
in the dark water,
come home again,
not lost
in the eternity
of their blue life.
Jonathan Moya Oct 2020
Time flies by in the animated flashes between
the silver frames of the train’s windows,
moving as fast as each perceived thought,
a time machine rattling between future-past:
egg sandwiches downed with blue electrolytes,
rustling newsprint coexisting with touch phones,  
the woman in black journeying to a funeral
across from the discretely breast feeding mom,
a heart broken teen laughing at her exes
first TikTok dance she liked and saved.

A track repair forced a two hour timeout
for the executive in the gray suit
to the Natural History Museum, forcing
admiration of things greater than himself-
pterodactyls swinging on steel wires,
T-Rexes corseted in titanium tendons all
coexisting  with their extinction meteorite-
a flying blue whale finishing the diorama
of him ignoring his ancestors in ancient skins
around a dwindling fire pit as he exits.

The train rattles on slightly lurching
back and forth in a stasis of motion
that passes the upturned prairie grass
that transitions towards the end stop
and its final suburban destination.
The executive doodles a Buffalo
on his phone app, one that is obscured
by the barely drawn coal stoking locomotive
belching smoke like a cellophane flame
far from the small screen frame.

The smoke unravels to a vets wife
wearing a Navajo smock,
pearling and unpearling
the mistakes in the weave
of powder blue baby socks.
In the upheld light of her vision
the quartz bison teams the bluing
vista caught in the indigenous hunt,
red faces obscured in the herky-jerky
of horsed riders and hurling arrows.

She imagines her bright face boy
staring unblinkingly at the sky,
free of the stuttering window’s glare,
reveling in the glint of hooves and dust,
unaware of the rain and flies to come.
Jonathan Moya Oct 2020
Strange fruit lives in the
bones of black mothers,

the blood of their sons,
marrow of their daughters.

Blue winds drift by
full of poplar scents,

aromas that never leave
the maternal soul.

They exhort their sons
to be careful,

be safe,  
make it back home.
  
They know they can die
for the smallest things,
for absolutely nothing.

Yet, they also know the American Dream
through the body of their sons
they hold closely in their arms.

They watch them leave,
hoping they experience

just ordinary prejudice and
not a blue knee on their neck,

that sculpts
them both
into a black pieta

Note:  

Strange Fruit refers to the song about lynching made popular by both Nina Simone and Billie Holiday.  Here are the lyrics:

Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swingin' in the Southern breeze
Strange fruit hangin' from the poplar trees
Pastoral scene of the gallant South
The bulgin' eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolias sweet and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burnin' flesh
Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck
For the rain to gather
For the wind to ****
For the sun to rot
For the tree to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop
Jonathan Moya Oct 2020
I watch my love,
almost a mermaid,
standing in the kiss
of shoreline and ocean,
washing sand from
her glistening form.

In the pause
between tides
I tie a hope line,
strong as
my inglorious life,
to her toe.

She swims through it,
hardly noticing my intent,
only her friends
crowding around,
reflecting her noise.

Shadows pass her face,
gravely drip
down her body
as her rising beauty
drifts away from me
and the setting sun.
Jonathan Moya Oct 2020
Losing
a child never known
a mother known

love found
love lost

memories remembered
memories not remembered

old man’s tears
grief in womanly rags


heartbreak
Jonathan Moya Oct 2020
The only choice
                        is blossoming
                                            in  the terra cotta
                                                   let the bright
                         renderings loom          
                                                a bloom
                                 too heavy
              for the stem.
Jonathan Moya Sep 2020
1.

The motherless-fatherless God
orphans the world in His own image,
His experience, His own elevated thoughts.

Yet He is unsatisfied, unhappy for
His creation is not perfect enough.

Even the little man with His breath-spark
is an unfulfilling design, in tun dissatisfied.
  
Everything has weight but
nothing has fullness.

Only the birds achieve effortless flight
and the planets spin easily in space.

2.

Creation shatters in the layers of night
and reforms in the weak rays of dawn.

The moon shows the scars of His longing
and the sun the flame of His abandonment.

In punishment He permanently
orphans the land from the sea
and the earth from the sky.

In scorn He lets His man creation
people the earth and die too soon,

the posthumous orphan left-behinds
of His own abandoned dreams.

His child cries out “Father!”
on his forsaken cross.  

Only the Romans sate
his thirst with vinegar.

He can not listen, only turn away
and resume creating and
spinning far better worlds.

3.

The orphans of God feel the fatal loss,
the doom of the abandoned earth,
and refuse to cringe or weep,

hoping the manner of their death
shall redeem their birth in His hope
even as they lurch toward the grave
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