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Jonathan Moya May 2020
My dog finds a conch nestled in the sand-
half dead, half alive- in the foaming tide,
She paws at its exposed pinkness
ignoring the hermit crab seeking shelter.

The conch shrivels beyond its lip
the scent of dead flowers pouring out,
my dog in a frenzy to taste its exotic flesh,
this beautiful creature sheltering in place.

Resisting the urge to pluck it from its shell
I pick it up and toss it beyond her scent,
beyond the fear, disease, the quarantine
I must always return to in silence.

As the shell sinks back to its home,
I now know everything dies in the sand.
Jonathan Moya Mar 2019
I have something I must confess to you
I pick my nose, eat all my buggers too.
This causes distress and disgust I know    
still off the floor I’ve  eaten food that glows.

Science says that it’s all just for the best
for I immunize against just those pests,
my antibodies delight in the twirl
of not taking a break from this ill world.

Be too clean enough, watch your body die,
a clam unable to grow pearls inside.

The history of hay fever  attests
it started an aristocratic pest
until more begats trickled it to the rest.
Years later immunity herd resets
made your older ***** hand many bros
less the cause of your sneezing and your woes.
Now cleaner living, hygienic hands,
less man, swing it back to the wealthy clans.

The fate of humanity all well depends
on the fact antibodies never end.
Evolution favors the hardy bugs
making man one of its many doomed shrugs.
Disease, extinction, not in human plan,
he will fight, fight to be part of this land.

Vaccines have prevented much needless death
giving antibodies a daily test.
We have avoided all that still does ****
yet  allergies still make one run to hills,
allowing even worst auto-inflamed chills.
Giving all your antibodies a rest
is not the answer for ****** distress.

Time to adapt bodies to the new world.
Not **** both good and bad in the big furl.
Let it listen, learn and train friend from foe,
not pay attention to the ad man’s show.

Man has conquered this small space to survive,
he must evolve away to really thrive.
We are unsafer when we **** all risk,
to immunize, immunize is the trick.

So I will pick my nose, eat my buggers,
knowing I am creating new lovers
not afraid at all to hug each other.
Jonathan Moya Jul 2020
If I shut the border,
no one will shut their window,
hide in their closet,
lock their door.

They would shake the blinds of moths,
bring the dog in from the doghouse,
let the cat feast after the mouse hole
has been plugged with a door wedge.

In the distance
the train whistle blows
dispersing mist and rain.
No one steps off nor boards.

The bird nest is not abandoned.
The hollow of the tree stays hollow.
Nothing has shut down at all.

My pen scribbles a poem
only to watch the black words
return to the reservoir.

I open the dictionary to the word “hope”,
but the page refuses to settle
until I put all the words in them
face down on the writing table.

My stoma grumbles louder than my stomach.
I shut my cancer in the mother-of-pearl.
My wife’s cancer is placed in the
small valise of all our memories.

I can’t shut down the museum.
It already is.
I can’t shut down the cinemas.
They already are.
Only the pharmacies are open.

I shut down my mouth
on my broken jaw
with five missing teeth
only to feel the maw of death.

I shut down the ash of my childhood
into a golden urn of my own design.

I shut down America, I shut down God,
putting them both between the now
empty covers of the dictionary missing hope.

I shut down my passions, my emotions
in the moldy basement of my despair.
My shut down love is chained in the dungeon.

Shut up, shut down,  I repeat  to myself,
until those words lose all definition,
until my lips are sealed in pain and
the only thing left is my total shutdown.
Jonathan Moya Nov 2020
In the early morning rise,
my mother and I
take a ride
to the hospital
where I was born
and she has her
dialysis treatments.
Her feet,
wrinkled and bruised,
exhausted
are raised
on a leather pedestal.

They remind me
of Grandma’s
heavy black nylons
that pooled around
her ankles
as she prayed
the rosary at night
in the gentle sway
of her rocking chair,
praying through the days
and all the
joyful,
luminous,
sorrowful,
glorious mysteries,
the standing
required for raising
thirteen children
on platefuls
of morning quesitos,
revoltillos,
bowls of crema
and loaves
of pan de aqua,
three hours
of washing, ironing
and folding their vestidos,
the lunches of
mofongo, and pasteles,
the dinners of
asopao de gandules,
the culling of coins
from a big crystal bowl
to buy dulces
at Carmen’s bodega
just down the block
on Fulton and Seventh.

My mother only had four children,
three boys and a girl,
and just like abuela,
she nourished
them the same way—
standing long and hard
until her feet gave out
and her blood wore down,
in the days before
the seams of myself
unraveled in black threads
and dispersed in tears
to every corner.

In the dreams
for the reality
that never occurred
I would
massage her feet,
put the richest nard
generously on them
like the chastised Mary
did for Jesus,
bandage them in flesh.

The little memories
are unremembered
to the world
except for
the faithful sons
and daughters
who recall only
the clinking of
thirty shiny silver pieces
placed silently
into their open palms,
betraying the reality
with the buffing of memory
into better hopes and dreams,
a poetry
of bruised feet,
blood,
the scent
of good Boricua cuisine,
the silent
watching  
mother
asleep.
Jonathan Moya Mar 2022
Sixty degrees and clear.
She dies -morning hospice shift
while I’m getting ready
to visit her.
Waxen in her white bed,
arms bruised and quiet now,
mouth wide in a gasp
as if in scream, as if saying
ah, no!  Both eyes closed,
turned down for my visit,
denied all further light,
sky or even ceiling.
I touch her hand. It is
cold.  It’s only been
two hours. At the threshold
I see the elevator.
I’m not ready
to drop down that tunnel.
I go back and kiss her forehead.  
Outside, the clear light types her life.
Jonathan Moya Feb 15
Skin


I felt the skin of my father—
his thumb a soft shawl
that enveloped our
intertwined hands.

And when the embrace broke—
how my tiny fingers traced
the moss line of his skull
until it became a familiar garden.

How he would embrace mother, after-
wards in her floral gown, so tenderly, that
I would sneak in later to smell the
trace of his skin on her every thread.

After they both passed away my grief
prodded me to smell his (and her) gonenes
on my body, their last skin living in
hard, heavy knots on my face and  hands.

At  night, in the skin of sleep,
he (she) tumbles out in a
nub of bones, his (her) memories
crawling on my skin, an open wound.
Jonathan Moya Dec 2020
The music is the scent in the air
that changes everything.

“I’ve got no time to lie,
I’ve got no time to play your silly games,”

it croons with a sweet she reggae lilt
pairing off the lovers from the pretenders,

shedding bodies to kiss and writhe
in adjacent rooms or the nearest alley

until only the a cappella
is left in the haze of ****

and turntable revolutions,
the scent of spicy ****
marinated in a calypso afternoon.

There be time for Marley and
his Small Axe vibe after they be gone,

the Rasta boys with their black power
rave, body slamming each other.

It’s all be a silly game, man-
a ***** dream to knowing Jah.

They be warriors until the last spin,
and it be time to turn spear to

that big mama cross they forever carry
and must fold to fit on the bus.
Based loosely on the second of the Steve McQueen film series Small Axe, titled Lovers Rock
Jonathan Moya Nov 2020
All you wicked men
what is wrong with you?

There is no black Justice
seen on the Sistine Chapel.

Only the stupidities that
can make a stuff bird laugh-

the small axe ready
to cut the big tree down.

https://youtu.be/b0Tk-FoiX_0

Based loosely on theSteve McQueen anthology  of films.  The first in the series is titled Mangrove.  The title is from a Bob Marley song.
Jonathan Moya Sep 2020
Smash the glass if you must, yet
do it gently using soft hammers.
Catch the fury in your breath and
release its image on the pane.

The goal is not destruction but creation,
to leave behind something cracked
yet still whole, hanging precariously together,
a reminder that we are all shards about to fall.

Tap and if it forms a line tap again,
until a lip forms a mouth, maybe yours,
a tear- an eye like your mother’s,
again, your father’s shattered brow.

Leave enough of you behind
for them to complete.
Gentrify the other glasses with
the genealogy of all your pain.

Make everything a museum of
all the world’s shattered glass
that none dare destroy  lest
even they fall apart
Jonathan Moya Jun 2019
At lunchtime pigeons and pinstripes dance with Rockette syncopation in front of Radio City
following the lead of thirty balloons encased
in vinyl tugged down the 50th Street station.

A chauffeured limousine pops out
a freshly groomed and leashed Pomeranian
seeking reunion with her dowager owner
getting purple locks and cuticles nearby.

At the columned entrance of Manhattan Bridge
two lovers kiss at the Canal Street stoplight
while a Vespa owner stops near the pedestrian
walk to hitch the love of his life in full stride.

Black children in bowlers and their Sunday finest
share a car in the Connie Island Cyclone
with Hasidic eyngls from Avenue J
carefully protecting their yarmulkes.

In the South Bronx the children of 136th Street
practice belly flops on an abandoned mattress
before chickening out on the adjacent kiddie pool
decorated with aqua waves, clown fish and mermaids.

The Monday field trip will transport ten
young Harlem poets to the Schomburg Library
to eulogize when Maya Angelou and Amiri Baraka
danced a jig on the ashes of Langston Hughes.

One will write a Christmas story about the time
Richard the reindeer took the Roosevelt Island
tram to bring  presents to the orphans
after Santa’s sled had fallen apart.
Jonathan Moya Aug 2020
We exist in
unkeepable bodies

and in the bending over
we decompose

for we are
are but the
memory of grief

that soft bodies
leave when they die.
Jonathan Moya Jun 2020
This soul is not a drip-dry thing.
It’s needs constant washing and wringing
to function cleanly.
It needs to tumble on high heat
to wear just right.
Hand wash it and it will shrink in protest.
Line dry it and you might think
it will smell of heaven but
it is the rancid smell of tussle and
toil that will stink the neighborhood.
And, oh, by the way you should never
bleach a thing that is already bleached.
Don’t use stain remover for that’s its job.
No starch, please.  Stiffness is not needed.
The same goes for heavy or light ironing.
Follow these directions and
the soul will last your lifetime.
It will protect you from
all the stains of the world.
Jonathan Moya Jun 2020
I asked the haberdasher
to make me a new soul.
something inexpensive
and lighter than 21 grams
with a loose fit.

He made it,
draped me in it
then disappeared.

I went home
and hung it in the closet
.
The next day
I couldn’t figure out
how to put it on.
So, I left it in on its hanger.

Overnight it got darker
and had become a shadow.

In the light it went white.
I draped it over arm
and went for a stroll.

It feel out of my grasp
onto the sidewalk,
picked itself up and
followed perfectly behind me.

By twilight it had become invisible
and was complaining loudly
that it wanted to go home.

I took it back
to the haberdasher
like it asked of me.

The store was closed
and empty of every soul.
His tools had been left out.
Sadly, the master had gone home.
Jonathan Moya Jun 2020
In the Charleston marketplace, a boutique auctions off
detailed limited edition replicas of black history: a slave
who hugs his chains upright over his porcelain hands,
is sold for $1200.00 to a man with a black Amex card,
a horde listening to the Emancipation Proclamation
goes for the same amount, Malcolm X gets $1000.00,
MLK just a little less, the OJ bobble heads sell for $60.00  
in the store’s gift shop while the white Bronco in
slow pursuit complete with flashing police lights
and breathless live commentary garners $2400.00,
Rosa Parks languishes at the rear eventually getting $300.00,
Eric Garner, Treyvon Martin, Rodney King are
part of lot sold for $500.00 clearance and a free
Black Lives Matter T-shirt, George Floyd gasping out
“I can’t breathe,” enshrined in a porcelain halo nabs
the same price, while the last figurine, of his murderer
being embraced by a very happy Donald Trump is
purchased by a man in a MAGA hat for $10,000.00.
Jonathan Moya Mar 2020
The rose has thorns because
it cares not to be touched.
Its color is a warning
for animals to stay away.
Its scent is a scream and
not a delight for us to own.
It exists in ****** stillness
bending only for the sun.
The scientist knows this
having heard its sub audible
howl with delicate machines
that probe its roots.
The poet plucks the bloom
unaware of the pain that
created that beauty,
the aroma that shouts
its death to its vegetable kind.
Jonathan Moya Dec 2020
“Don’t make me bury you,” the elder
spoke to the younger
over the phone,
knowing that his child
had inherited all his demons.

“I will support you
if you want to do rehab,”
he whispered,
that old Harry Chapin Song,
Cat’s in the Cradle,
about fathers and sons
circling in his head;

his son’s new one,
Harlem River Blues,
kicking it off the loop:

Lord, I'm goin' uptown
to the Harlem River to drown 
***** water gonna cover me over  
And I'm not gonna make a sound …”

“I won’t,”  the son
promised his father.
A click and a dial tone
was the final statement.

That night
Justin Townes,
named after
Townes van Zandt,
the folk oracle
that was his dad’s mentor,
died alone
in a Nashville apartment.
A mixture of  
******* laced with fentanyl
was found in his blood.
He was just 38.

When a child dies
the father no longer a dad,
no longer
the parent of Justin Townes,
or just J.T.,
his first little boy,
adopts his own identity back,
rears it fondly in memory,
burying the child’s legacy
until the erosion of time
files him down
to his birth name,
just plain old Steve-
Stephen Fain Earle
from Fort Monroe, Virginia.

When Townes died
he did a tribute album.
When his old demons returned
he released a tribute album.
When grief surrounded him
and the whiskey bottled beckoned
Steve mined J.T.’s  catalog
for a ten song tribute session
that can be done with that rock sneer
they both shared.  

The only thing that mattered
was that it be released
on the day of what would
have been J.T.’s 39th birthday.

He would concentrate on
the songs whenever he wondered
why he stayed clean and J.T.  couldn’t.
Why did he survive and J. T. succumb?

Steve didn’t hate the fact
that J.T.’s songs
were better than his,
his guitar fingerpicking
was more mind blowing,
that musically J.T. could play
Mance Lipscomb blues
in a way Steve was never  
able to figure out,
not even that J.T.
had a way better voice.

He was always reminding J.T.
how proud he was of him,
how much he loved him.

No, Steve hated that it wasn’t
enough to save him,
that he was the stronger man.
that they both shared the same disease.

Steve sang, his craggy voice
the perfect underscore
for the dark themes
in J.T.’s ballads:
a drowning death
(Tell my mama I love her,
Tell my father I tried.
Give my money
to my baby to spend);
the phantom-limb ache
for a former lover
(Even though I know you’re gone
I don’t have to be alone now.
You’re here with me every night
When I turn out the lights.)

It was therapy not catharsis.
Steve always sang
because he needed to.

J.T. was the opposite—
dressing in retro style,
reveling in the notoriety
of his intimidating talent
that was always trying to
eclipse his more famous parent.

Steve wanted this to be a memorial
between father and son.  
No guest singers, especially
those ******* enablers
that helped **** him
with their nonintervention.

He never included J.T.’s songs
about absent fathers
and single mothers.
He knew only J.T.
could rightfully sing those.

Steve was expecting it to be
a horror show emotionally.
He felt sad, but not disappointed
when it was just business as usual.

When it came time to perform
John Henry Was a Steel Drivin’ Man
he deliberately emulated
J.T.’s fingerpicking.

He felt jealous that his son
was able to write
the John Henry song
he always failed at.

When it came time to record
the album’s last song,
Last Words,
the only song
written by Steve,
and like the
more sentimental
Harry Chapin one,
a heartbreaking synopsis
of a father’s journey,
from cradling his newborn son
to speaking to him for the last time,
the pain returned and
their shared disease
pulled inside him.

By the time it was on tape
he knew it was the only
song he had written in his life
where every single word
in it was true.  

Last thing I said
was ‘I love you.’
Your last words to me
were ‘I love you too.’


https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FXgtD3jfikk&feature=youtu.be
Jonathan Moya Jun 2020
It’s in the shading.
It’s the way the light is written.
It’s the way the observer takes it all in.
It’s the way it convinces one that the world will last.
It’s the way it plants a seed in the mind,
the way it touches one inside, lives inside
the streets of memory, inhabits one’s emotional house,
sunsets, harbors, all the great perfect things
that exists in the brief eternity that loop eternally,
that convinces one that the extraordinary
is the purpose of existing in ordinary time,
that every moment lives for the perfect still life.
Jonathan Moya Apr 2021
Super Nova

I destroy the gold house
inside my soul—

the nova of light on
gold archway, gold mantle,
gold walls.  The last bits of

real places that once shined.
l thought, forever

in the aura of sun-
shine on once
gold rooftop, gold windows,

gold doors. Look in,
search and see, find: black gold

steeped in the dark
burned down to ash of
gold wood, gold grass

the once gold streets, gold hills
all around my dead sun.


This dead sun will never rise, rise
and shine its light
to my gold soul.
Jonathan Moya Sep 2020
With the start of NFL football yesterday, I must salute those brave and patriotic players and teams who take a stand against police brutality of black people. I must share this poem and video that my Miami Dolphins shared.  I stand in complete solidarity with the Dolphins on this issue.  

https://twitter.com/i/status/1304186433054420992

It is authentic? That’s the mystery.

Or is it just another symbolic victory?

Now there’s two anthems. Do we kneel do we stand.

If we could just right our wrongs we wouldn’t need two songs.

We don’t need another publicity parade.

So we’ll just stay inside until it’s time to play the game.

Whatever happened to the funds that were promised. All of a sudden we got a collapsed pocket?

The bottom line should not be the net profit. You can’t open your heart when it’s controlled by your wallet.

Decals and patches. Fireworks and trumpets. We’re not puppets. Don’t publicize false budgets.

Ask the pundits and we shouldn’t have a say. If you speak up for change, then I’ll shut up and play.

If we remain silent, that would just be selfish. Since they don’t have a voice, we’re speaking up for the helpless.

It’s not enough to act like you care for the troops. Millions for pregame patriotism. You get paid to salute.

Lift every voice and sing? It’s just a way to save face. Lose the mask and stop hiding the real game face.

So if my dad was a soldier, but the cops killed my brother, do I stand for one anthem, and then kneel for the other?

This attempt to unify only creates more divide. So we’ll skip the song and dance. And as a team we’ll stay inside.

We need changed hearts. Not just a response to pressure. Enough. No more fluff and empty gestures.

We need owners with influence and pockets bigger than ours. To call up officials and flex political power.

When education is not determined by where we reside. And we have the means to purchase what the doctor prescribed.

And you fight for prison reform and innocent lives.

And you repair the communities that were tossed to the side.

And you admit you gain from it, and swallow your pride. And when greed is not the compass, but love is the guide.

And when the courts don’t punish skin color, but punish the crime.

Until then, we’ll just skip the long production and stay inside.

For centuries, we’ve been trying to make you aware.

Either you’re in denial, or just simply don’t really care.

It’s not a black/white thing. Or a left/right thing. Let’s clean the whole bird, and stop arguing about which wing.

Then, Flores faced the camera, and concluded:

Before the media starts wondering and guessing, they just answered all your questions. We’ll just stay inside.
Jonathan Moya Jun 2019
In the stillness of a teacup morning
in Amsterdam a crowd with yellow stars
query each other, a collapse of
suitcases and stuffed pillow cases
huddled under a gas lamp at a corner square,
while those in the stories above slowly turn away.

A few days before the yellow stars were
twenty-one children with backpacks
dreaming of a long field trip to Deventer.
The school picture they posed for would
be discovered fifty-four years later
under the frame of an oil painting
of the freedom monument in Dam Square.

Sieg, wandering in the fog of Bergen-Belsen
his classmates part of the mound
of George Rodgers well published frieze,
the only one of them not camera shy,
made it back to his mother and sister,
forever now a New York Jew.

Before them the square hosted
the frail bones of yellow star seniors,
their children depositing them
silently and hurriedly under
the hiss of the lamp shutting
off from the night watch.

Daan sewed the photo
of his yellow star grootmoeder
on a wooden chair staring into the sun
into  the lining of his jacket
and felt its pressure on the day
when the train arrived for him too.

The freight train to the Westbrook stockyard
the stench of manure, ****, fetid hay,
the old scent of cattle mingling with man,
fear embedded in every board,
was, as always, on time.
Jonathan Moya Jan 2020
In the shadow of Lincoln
he heard Mahalia shout out
“Tell them about the dream, Martin!
Tell them about the dream.”

He remembered the vision
and the words that came to him
on that long walk to freedom
on that 75 degree June Detroit day.

It was evident as the clear water
of the mall’s reflecting pool,
the Washington monument in front,
the declarations of Jefferson behind him.

He again heard Mahalia’s words sing in him,
the dream of 12 thousand 500 score faces,
wanting to listen, pleading to listen
but only Mahalia’s rising above this soul’s choir.

He pushed the papers to the lectern’s left
and his old preacher voice remembered Detroit,
Montgomery, Albany, Birmingham.
He rose, called to them and the mountains beyond.
Jonathan Moya Nov 2020
Due to the pandemic the children are not coming.  
The adults will set a table for two and wait for the zoom chat after the game with  
the Dallas Cowboys and
the Washington Football Team
formerly known as the Redskins.

They will double their Thanksgiving feast of
Burger’s Hickory Smoked Spiral Sliced City ham,
Betty Crocker’s Cheddar and Bacon Scalloped potatoes,
Bake House Creations Crescent rolls,
oven roasted Brussel sprouts with bacon,
sliced acorn squash with a brown sugar glaze,
and a five cup Ambrosia salad of sour cream,
pineapple tidbits, canned Mandarin oranges in light syrup, organic flake coconut and mini marshmallows
marinated until the marshmallows get gooey
and impart sweetness to the sour cream.

The Trump over Biden over any Democrat arguments
will thankfully not happen this year
and blissfully never again.  For this year,
at least, things will seem to return to normal.
The miracle will go by unrecorded, unnoticed.

They are secretly glad they don’t have to dress up
in the Pilgrim and Indian dress embroidered
with wild turkeys, Indian corn that creased around
to reveal the vast wild fields and forest ready
to be explored and traded for beads and
promises of sharing the American bounty;
the ugly Garfield the Cat sweater over
the crisp white shirt and black slacks
bought at the J.C. Penny liquidation sale.
Today Dad will proudly wear his
aqua Miami Dolphins jersey,  sweat pants,
socks and comfy ‘Phins black briefs
with the not so stretchy waist band.

Go Tua,  memories of the
undefeated Dolphins 1972 season,
the big Thanksgiving brawls of 1977
spurred by Conrad Dobler
***** hits on Bob Griese,
the Dan Marino five Turkey Day
interceptions against the Dallas Cowboys
in 1999 that was the final sunset of
a first ballot Hall of Farmer career
danced in Dad’s head.
Mom just wanted to catch up on
all those Dark Shadows soaps and
Housewives of Whatever she missed.
Dressed in her blue angels nightgown
she rolled her eyes when
first football game of the day switched on.

They vaguely dreamed of the days
when his hair was thick and black
and hers was long, golden and easy;
all the trips they planned
and sometimes took
where they climbed bluffs
and overlooked storybook plains.

Today they would look at each other
with the same everyday stare
and notice their wrinkled hands
and clink together the strong, cheap wine
poured into leftover mason jars.
They toasted each other
and whatever would come next,
the decades of side by side,
their great good luck,
the incoming Zoom
of children and grandchildren.
Jonathan Moya Mar 2019
He could only understand her with his blows,
grabbing her by the throat
strangling the last words out of her,
hitting her on the top of her head
trying to knock any idea
of her making him a better man,
like his father tried 136 times before.

Yes, he remembered every blow he received
just as she took tally of all 67 he delivered.  

The next one will be 68,
halfway to his father’s count.
He will stop, he thought,
consoling himself with the moral insight
that he was only half as bad as his old man.  

Besides 69 was a love number,
a time  for her to show him some appreciation
by getting on top and blowing the **** out of him, while he turn his face away from
the tangle of her brown ***** hair
because the taste of her abuse
wasn’t sweet enough to his tongue.

He dragged her out through the fields
towards the swamp.  The old rage wafted up
and the only thing that mattered was that he **** it, ****** that *****, briefly ashamed by the remembrance of his six year old son calling her that same word in the kitchen with the equal velocity
and rage he felt right now.

He pulled his deer knife out of his pocket,
the small one he used for gutting,
placed it at the tenderest part of her throat,
the spot were frightened blood pounded
and felt the most alive.  He was planning
on burying her underneath the wreckage
of that old sorry ******* Ford,
the one he gave up trying to rehabilitate
because the parts no longer existed.  

He never noticed his boy was following behind.  
He dropped the knife when he heard
the two screams come, one ripped
through the voice box of his wife, the other
off the tongue of the son he hardly noticed.

The 137th blow his father never got to deliver,
the 68th blow of their marriage
was delivered by her, a left handed
backward elbow straight into his Adam’s apple.  

While he strangled
in the recognition of his blood leaving him
and returning,- no, not really, not ever, he thought,-
she delivered the 69th straight into his nuts,
both knowing and relishing the irony.  
It was the last joke they would ever share.

She ran behind and grabbed their child,
then both made a dash for
the two lane black tar road
thirty yards into their future.  
The first light they saw
stopped and took them away.  

The last thing he heard,
as gravity pulled him down
to be buried in the mud of his own shame
was the simultaneous half laugh, half scream
that was the lingering echo of their last caress,
his savage groan and recognition
of their last punchline vomiting out of him
as he collapsed and buried his face in his hands, acknowledgement that he was half the father,
the man, the child everyone thought he was.
Jonathan Moya Jul 2020
The Pandemic has closed
the theaters and cinemas.

On stage a lone actor commits
suicide in the loneliness.

On screen the two lovers run to each
other against the march of soldiers.

The actor’s death is an extravagant fake,
a nod to the art of dying a good stage death.

The lovers perform ****** asphyxiation
until the man seems to fall deeply asleep.  

The actor pulls the dagger from his neck,
red silk flowing freely from his throat.

In the light motes coming from the projector
Sada realizes that Kichizo has died.

The red silk now entombs Sensei Omiya
like a gown as he reaches out to Sada’s cry.

Sada kisses Kichizo for the final time
as she removes Kichizo‘s blade.

Sensei Omiya drowns in a swell of red silk.
“Sada, my child, what shame have you brung?”

Sada cuts Kichizo’s ***** off cleanly carrying
it inside her as she madly wanders Tokyo.

The projector clicks off, the house lights fade.
The transformation is done.  
The performance is over

Notes:
The lovers story is based on the plot of the Japanese film In the Realm of the Senses by Nagisha Oshima.  The theater story is intended to be a subplot of the lovers plot. The theater plot is also intended to invoke images of Japanese Kabuki theater.
Jonathan Moya May 31
I was expecting giants—brushstrokes that shaped history, colors that conquered time. But the walls whispered absence, their icons carried elsewhere, lent to hands that bear their weight.  

Only the quiet ones remained, anchored in the still air, aching to be adopted, longing for eyes to grant them meaning, a gaze that wholly loves their frail existence, to be taken in—cradled, fed, held close to the heart, nourished within the soul’s ache.  

I wandered the museum aimlessly until the bright colors of the exile wing drew me in—a modest room, slightly bigger than a living room, yet dwarfed by the grandeur of the main galleries, the mélange of American and European masters—into the parlor reserved for Caribbean and Latin artists. The air felt lighter, without the weight of displacement that clung to the masters before them.  

And among them stood the most majestic surprise. Hanging proud, slightly left of center, was “Children at the Beach,” a painting by Roberto Moya— my Uncle Bob.

I stepped closer, my heart quickening as the memory sharpened. It was almost all I remembered it to be when it hung as my abuela’s centerpiece— two girls and a boy with sun-golden locks, digging in the sand, one watching the other two unearthing what they hoped to be priceless treasures—maybe an old Spanish coin, a clam with pearl, perhaps a hermit crab finding the perfect refuge. I inhaled as I noticed the salt air tangle their hair, the ocean stretching beyond them in loose, unhurried strokes. Their joy was unframed by fame,  and they were hung in this house by familiarity— and no less eternal.  
    
But here, in this museum, the painting felt different. It no longer carried the warmth of a centerpiece or the quiet reverence of a family relic. It was orphaned among the forgotten and overlooked.  
  
I traced the exhibit label with my eyes. It was indeed Bob’s work. “Robert Moya (1931 - 2008” was a Puerto Rican painter, printmaker, and digital artist. Born in New York, raised between two homes—an identity split, stretched across borders.”

The description continued, but the words rang hollow. “Moya’s hands found lines before words…” A stylized version of his history, carved into museum language, stripped of the details my abuela had once storied us with.  I knew the real version—the restless childhood, the copying of Sorolla and Sargent, the drift toward abstraction, the heavy pigments, the quick strokes that pressed emotion into the image. The Bob I knew was not a plaque but a presence, yet here he was, reduced to a fact.  

In the somber, reverent light of my widowed Abuela’s living room, “Children at the Beach” had always existed in pristine warmth, its colors vivid, its figures untouched by shadow. But here, in this near-forgotten wing of the museum, it lived under different conditions—without the flattering glow of swivel spotlights, illuminated only by the raw, harsh Kelvins of recessed bulbs. The light was unkind, exposing details I had never noticed before, forcing every imperfection and brushstroke into full view.  

And then I saw it—something I had never seen in all the years of looking. Beneath the blonde girl digging in the sand, a faint pentimento emerged, the painted-over outline of a dark-haired boy. Under the only boy, a barely perceptible shadow of black curls. For the standing girl, the same. The golden-haired children had not been golden-haired at all. Their brightness had been layered over—an artistic wig, a deliberate revision meant to disguise what had initially existed beneath.  

Standing before his work, I felt a quiet sadness settle inside me. Was this how legacy worked? Was this how remembrance became an institution—neatly cataloged, distanced, no longer held within a family’s hands?  

But seeing it here, in this room of exile, in the hum of low-lit bulbs and hushed footsteps, I felt the weight of history settle differently.  

The painting was a certainty at my abuela’s home—a familiar presence, a relic of joy. Here, it became something else, something unsettled, that carried the quiet ache of displacement.  

Bob’s work was remembered and preserved but not exalted or held in the giants' spaces. I wanted to ask if he had ever imagined this—his brushstrokes caught between belonging and exclusion, a legacy measured but never fully embraced.  

For the first time, I wondered if he had painted for permanence or for profit, if each line had been an answer to a question only he could hear.

2.  

The boy who was erased and replaced was my father, Frank Moya—an anesthesiologist, Bob’s only and older brother. Five years gone, Bob seventeen.  

Once, they had moved in tandem, twin orbiting bodies drawn by the same hunger. Frank chasing form, Bob breathing life into color. One tethered to certainty, the other lost to the sway of pigment, chasing something unnamed.  

Talent is not inherited like blood. Frank’s hands were stiff and precise, designed for incisions, not creation. His lens saw only the present, never the shimmer of what lay beneath.  

Then came the unraveling. Success stretched between them like unspooled thread, love thinning the cord.  

Elsi—my mother—had been the axis. Bob painted her into permanence, bound her to canvas. Frank made her his wife, held her in his arms, and called her his own. But art does not forgive time.  

Beauty is rarely lost at once—it fades in the margins, in quiet shifts too delicate to name until absence is undeniable.  

She softened. Weight settled where grace had once lived. Diabetes carved itself into her bones.  

And Frank stepped back, distanced himself in increments, shrinking his presence before severing it entirely. He left, remarried, and claimed a new life apart from hers.  

Bob married, too, and had two sons. One found words in music, the other in blueprints and brushstrokes, his hands preserving what his father left behind.  

Then Elsi died.  

And that was when Bob laid his last offering.  

The pentimento came in mourning—an attempt at reaching back, at rewriting what had been. The boy blurred beneath the sand—an artist’s revision, but also something gentler, something aching.  

Bob never spoke his intent. Maybe he hoped Frank would understand and see the tenderness in the act. Maybe he believed his absence could make space for something new.  

But timing is the cruelest editor.  

Frank saw offense, not mercy. Rejection hardened in his throat, brittle and immovable. To the world, he was generous. But bitterness is selective, and he keeps his guard for Bob.  

So the painting became Bob’s last attempt—his last hand-stretched across time. And when the olive branch crumbled, Bob let the boy fade—not erased, not forgotten, but veiled beneath layers of ochre and cerulean.  

Standing before the canvas, I felt the weight of what could have been—a reconciliation never written, a bridge never built.  

In Frank, I inherited certainty, a mind fixed in practicality. In Bob, I inherited words—how they curve and press emotion into the image. But I inherited neither the brush nor the eye—only the ache of wanting to shape something real.  

I was born with the artist’s sight, but not his hand. My fingers fumbled where Bob’s flew. My canvas was words, tethered to Bob’s color.  

Yet here, in the hush of forgotten halls, I learned the craft beyond creation—how patience carves meaning, how absence sharpens sight.  

How memory, like paint, is layered, concealed, revealed only when light shifts just so.  

Poetry, like pentimento, is a lesson in seeing—what was, what is, and what lingers beneath the brush.
Jonathan Moya Sep 2020
I watched in the swirl, the blue fish paddle
steadily away from the boat,
knowing that it had been hooked before,
the wound protruding wormlike from his jaw.

Today would not be his last fight.
He would not be a photo prize.
He wanted not the weight of air,
just the restless, endless flow all around,
the homely tide.

Algae speckled his skin
refracting rainbow fingers
like prayers in the morning
and brown moldy spots on his lateral line
like vespers recited in a dark nave.

Swirls of lilies flowed beneath his belly
revealing his antiquity and mortality.

He danced defiantly along the reef,
shedding embedded sand,
corrupted water weighing him down
the worms wriggling on barbed Js above,
the anemones gesticulating alluringly beneath.

He once was suspended between ocean/heaven
everything green slipping off,
his blue mocked by the lighter sky,
his lungs rejecting its oxygen,
his blood rejecting its gravity
that cut his very being.

He was born with scales,
flexible bones Ill-suited for this rigid world,
born to glisten never knowing.  
more beautiful peony’s,
things more lovely than him
rooted in lands beyond his sight and ken.

His eyes seemed larger than mine
and in a certain graceful way
they had the heavy density of a stain glass panel
trying to contain all beauty in an icon.
They shifted only towards the light.

He stared mouth agape and every scar,
every hook wound fell off, revealed itself,
proof that he will never be any one’s prize.

Like everyone else, he had learned
the wisdom of the wound,
that life was not in victory,
but in surviving, the possibility,
the hope of catch and release.

I started my rusty boat
and in the dart of his rainbow
swimming away, swimming away,
I felt the thanks of his fin and tail,
as I moored in the direction home.c
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 Feb 2020
His arms were too short to box with God,
so God sent him down for more sparring.

He boxed the devil over and over and over,
the Father, Son, Holy Spirit doing the scoring.

When he beat the devil every round,
he tried again to punch the Lord.

His arm were still too short to reach His chin,
though this time he lasted about a round.

God sent him down again to box the sin of man,
Jesus needing a break from all that jive.

When he broke even he died and went to heaven,
spoiling for a rematch with the holy Lord.

At the pearly gates he landed a blow on Jesus’ chin
knocking a tooth out to a thousand clouds.

Jesus picked himself up from the canvas of heaven.
He smiled at him.  “Good fight”, he said.
Jonathan Moya Jul 2020
Shout into the eyes
of sunlight
of the boy who dances in the light.

Every dragon’s death
foretells this child
onto even the smallest realm.

The Phoenix is an ally
to the boy
who forges worlds.

The stars proclaim his shine
this boy who dances in the light.

He is the boy
who flies
into the sun
and does not dissolve.

His chariot with flashing wheels
races with the rainbow.

He is the boy who
sells the golden trinkets
with 1001 truths in the bazaar.

Even the baubles know not all his stories
of pirates, pashas, tigers and kings.

After all has been vended
this boy with the wondrous tongue
will wipe the sweat of his brow
into the most damask bottle
and proclaim it genie’s breath.
In that living moment
the bullet goes right by me—
and in between all my prayers
and my eternal gratitude —
the child behind me dies.  
“Why did it  spare
me and not him?”,
I think over and over again—
counting the lifetime of wishes
that now will never
come true for him.—

It goes right by me—
penetrating present and future—
—dreams and nightmares—
I will sleep an hour more tonight—
—tomorrow, an hour less—
less—less until the end of my lifeline.
Out of all the others who’ve died
I will remember this child— little boy
in the depth of my veins and
the light rain that continuously falls—
even as the bullet goes by and bye.—
pass the fence to his grave.—

The bullet goes by me—
cutting through my words—
my sad attempt of an elegy for him—
all the grief that my soul strives to forget—
It goes right by me—
chance— unsmiling me for a lifetime.—
Jonathan Moya Feb 2020
What does a dog
know of being a wolf,
a wolf know of being a dog?

The wolf howls not
to understand the moon
but to know itself
in the community of nature,

to shout out
its place in the pack
and among the stars.

It knows hunger that
a dog will never know,
the desperation of the hunt,
and not a master’s command.

The wolf tastes the blood
of squirrel and rabbit,
the death of prey and
not the dream of it.

The wolf fears the spark,
the scent of the two foot,
the sound of its silver shout.

The dog knows its leash,
the comfort of the hearth,
the happy dreams that
come with a full stomach,

the fetch of a duck in its mouth
and not its curor,
the squeak of velveteen prey.

Even the dingo of the bush
scavenges for its food and
maybe dreams of human kindness
and living beneath his beams.

The dog shelters with him
and does not swelter
in the fury of the sun.

The dog knows God
through the hand of man.
The wolf knows no God
and scorns its inverted pet.

The wolf needs not good dogs.
It need only to be a good or bad wolf,
to heed the call of the wild.
Jonathan Moya Sep 2020
Abandoned in the middle of the blasted field,
its arms shredded, legs battered,
the chair exists in broken splendor
catching the best of the speckled light
dancing in the quivering shadows.
Lines of the seated father stain the backrest,
motherly molds are left behind in the seat foam,
the relentless kicks, tattoos of children’s feet
bruise the red velvet of the front rail.

At dawn, pulses of light run along its rails
dispersing all shadows to the wet ground.
At the speed of forgetfulness
two robins alight on this storm orphan,
widow, widower, this sole survivor,
with twigs to build a new stick home.
Jonathan Moya Jul 2024
i like to cling to the grime

the small grit of my father’s ashes
underneath my fingernails,
the part of him that refused
to fall to the rocks in the scattering

my mother’s scented oil in her hair,
her burning fat seasoning in the skillet
stinging my nostrils and eyes leaving me
seeing smelling less than my faultering ears

his ash sticks in the wall of my lungs
trying to pressure my air to diamonds
cutting me to his symmetry trying
always to rinse my blood of her tears
Jonathan Moya Sep 2019
Rapid City wears its patriotism like a shroud.
Corner streets are populated with less than
life-size statues of past presidents
squinting at the distant Black Hills
where the grandeur of Mt. Rushmore
casually crumbles their bronze dreams.

Wax settlers, loggers and gold miners
stake claims with souvenir hunters
touring a mine, panning for fool’s gold.

In nearby Custer, 75 breaths  from Wounded Knee,
shops hawk Chief Joseph, Sitting Bull, Geronimo t-shirts
proclaiming them “ The Original Founding Fathers.”
Mixed in are those in star-spangled letters and fireworks
proudly streaming “Welcome to America. Now Speak English.”

Rushmore was dynamited from a cliff
by a creator who spent the rest of his life
erecting grand Confederate gestures
out of ****** Georgia quartz monzonite—
finished and opened 100 years to the day
after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.  

Thirty minutes from Rushmore, existing in its shadow
on private land filled with dusty trails,
unfinished after seventy years,
probably still unfinished after twenty  more,
facing away from these great stone faces,
emerging from the side of great Thunderhead Mountain,

on an ivory stead with a mane of flowing river and wind,
exists the Oglala Lakota warrior Tasunke Witko
the worm of Crazy Horse the Old and Rattling Blanket Woman,
sibling of Little Hawk and Laughing One, memory of the spirit of
Black Buffalo and White Cow who walked with an Iron Cane,
all enclosed with him in this massive breath of white stone.

The history of this great Indian space stretches the land,
four times higher than the Statue of Liberty,
extending beyond the warrior frown, the pointing left arm.
The horse’s ear alone is the size of a rusty  reservation bus.
When finished it will be the largest sculpture in history,
bigger than the land, breath and all of Indian memory.

It was the Vision Quest of Chief Henry Standing Bear to show the whites that the red man had great heroes, too.
In a man named Korczak he found a kindred spirit,
a storyteller in stone, a survivor of Omaha Beach,
who when the first wife faltered, found a second
who gave him enough children to carry, sculpt the Bear Dream.  

The big chief’s face is still the only finished part.
Korczak’s wife and children toil with the rest,
struggling to capture the essence of a warrior
who never allowed his shadow to be snared
in the false glow of the white man’s light,
trusting only the rain beams that fall

onto his people, mountains, plains and buffaloes,
onto Paha Sapa, “the heart of everything that is,”
where the Lakota huddled while the world was created,
now a land of broken treaties and dying dreams,
drenched in the dust of tears underneath,
while this white face torn from red gazes East.
Wounded Knee is not only the sight of an 1800’s Indian Massacre but the rumored burial spot of Sitting Bull.

The grand confederate gesture refers to Stone Mountain park, a Mt Rushmore etched with the faces of the Confederacy: Robert E. Lee,
Jonathan Moya Oct 2020
Long the land watches for death or harvest
amongst the lulling black mounds
a slumber in piles,
huddled so neatly
without blankets
from the shivering wind blowing meanly
under the sway of the killing night’s climb.

Underneath are all bones,
life clutching the long tilled soil,
the farmer’s harlot oft despoiled,
denied wages, seeds scattered, an ever
cursing field,
demanding her coin,
the child
torn, sold from her womb.
Jonathan Moya Aug 2020
Ariana, adopted the old Greek ways,
when Nikos died diving for sponges.
She encased her curses into two lead stones:
smuggling one into his coffin,
dropping the other into Naxos deepest well.
She made sure Nikos soul would  
carry her curse to the underworld
before it ascended to heaven,
or activated fully on the river of forgetfulness
for Death to see, read, feel her grief.
She had hired the local poet who still 
remembered all the magical phrases
and could reverse the flow of words.
She wanted Death
to throw himself to the crows, 
split like she was divided inside,
perish the same way Nikos drowned,
****** Death’s eyes to drunkenness
till he became a burden to the earth,
a useless sack of spoiled wine.
As she turned back and 
started to look away
she heard Nikos voice echo to her.
She turned around  and  In
the mist that crawled away to the Aegean
was revealed three Cretan hounds snarling 
behind the gate of the rich shipbuilder’s house.
The sea, the earth the sky collapsed in her.
The sound of tides, the swirling dust, the rain were
mocking this girl who knew only ordinary curses,
this widow doomed to live a long, grieving life
listening for Nikos sounds until her very end.
Jonathan Moya Sep 2020
White and red roses
defend the mother’s coffin:
cherry stained,
her interlocked hands in prayer
draped in veil gauze,
her gold dress
the same she married in,
as the procession of her children
grieves in a black and white flow.

In a black and white flow,
each child lights a votive candle
that reflects the sanctuary lamp,
their tears and prayers—
hating themselves
for the gasping erasure inside,
the love not returned in time.

The love not returned in time
before the tears
of the blue ******
praying over her,
black hair
matching black hair,
alabaster hands
blessing burnt  
brown ones, anticipating
heaven’s restoration.

Anticipating heaven’s restoration
the congregation
steeple their hands and
chant for her dreams
to true,
her now
motherless children
to rise and stay united.

Rising and staying united
all her children
awkwardly cradle
their old gifted rosaries,
skipping Glory Be’s,
misremembering Our Fathers,
finally hiding in their tears
and the pale oval beads,

the pale ovals of their hands
buried in the vanilla scent
of candy florecitas
half mauled
in sugary communion,
their faith in confection
as strong as
believing their mother
would never die,

believing their dead mother  
would always protect them
even while the cancer within
ate her silence and resolve,
finally leaving them living
in a world of dollhouse sermons
and scented flowers with thorns,

scented flowers and thorns
and death marrying death,
matroning childhood,
life in its very pinkness,
child to mother to father

father to mother to child,
until night falls into blackness,
to black rot dusting
even lion and lamb,

lamb and lion
consecrated
to the last letter,

the last letter
of God’s tears,
the tears of now,

until now the tears
are nothing
but the chants of cries,

the song and chants of cries
born sober in the now
and the chant of tears

the tears of chants
and the children kneeling,
others kneeling,

kneeling others,
until there is
only the fall,

only the fall
of kneeling
in the now,

now in the fall
of kneeling
for love of each other

each other now in love,
or thinking they are in love
now with each other,

each other now in love,
knowing they are now in love
or soon will be.
Jonathan Moya Jun 2020
The poet signs his words to the deaf.
The screen behind exposes his faulty hands.
He is silent.
His hands a fire.

He knows there will be unintended words,
new meanings to old and familiar lines.
The muddle is his creation,
their new meaning, new poem,
both treachery and rebirth,
their dawn and twilight, their light and moon,
both hawk and silver fish gliding, swimming
high in the silent moonlight clouds and sky
of the noisy rewrite of their imagination.

He reads his words on their shirts.
Cloth sells better, than ten thousand books.
The swift river of lines comes in their colors too!
His restless words settle in for the show.
He feels like a naked stranger in an open door.


When his hands stop, the applause comes.
The deaf are enthusiastic clappers.
Something about getting off on the vibrations
created by their hands, he figures.
He’s happy when they come up to him,
signing new syllables
to be printed on upside down books.
Jonathan Moya Apr 2021
Blow the dust of history off our bones.
In the excavated ribs of ancient sailing ships
find the burial chambers of kings.

Blow the dust of history off our bones.
In the dig just below them,  but just over
the rubble of the blitz are the
cracks in the golden cathedral’s dome.

Blow the dust of history off our bones.
Hear the cough of the newborn that
ends unknown years later to the last ahem.

Blow the dust off history off our bones.
In the oil that bubbles up see the
trilobites, dinosaurs layered in the sludge.

Blow the dust of history of our bones.
Place the femur of all  misery neatly
on the museum shelf for all to see.
Jonathan Moya Sep 2020
The bus driver sees people as they really are:
survivors & corpses going for regular treatment,
shadows & lights moving in a tunnel,
loved & loveless reflections in a rear view mirror,
like him, the sufferers of whole-body vibrations
of the potholes & uneven pavements of the road,
the sedentary motion breaking their backs
until everything is saturated in grief, anger & pain.

In the swing room among the crack of eight *****
and the other drivers sullenly chewing their lunch
he writes a history of the young father struggling
with a stroller who slips on without paying,
the obituary of the white ghost with the
5 o’clock shadow who boards at the hospital,
all notes for the melodic line for his sax solo
at Johnny’s that night.

His fingers touch the imaginary valves
& before the movement is over
the road chants for his return.
He puts on his blue cap,
tucks in his shirt & straighten his pants.
The abuse is almost immediate,
starting before he can sit and close the door.
The engine revs with the  melodies of the city
& in the harsh notes, he hears the smooth variations
that will drive him through the long night ahead & home.
Jonathan Moya May 2022
My grief sails through joy
refusing to
tack the line of others-
straight, plain, flat and so so still-
the reason why I love it so.
No haven of pine and sand,
just mangrove roots
gnarled but knotted strong,
holding the beach against
the hurricane.
That it stands and so do I
is not a measure of what
I’ve known, or even the truth,
but all that I’ve lost.
Jonathan Moya Apr 22
I walked to the end of the pier
and could not throw your ashes into the sea.

It was easy with my father—
to see his blackness float in the air
and settle on the wrack line,
neither the earth nor sea’s possession.

But you, dear friend, my lost sister
not of the soul but of pain, solitude, loneliness,
of God demanding that I love the abandoned,
I can not throw back only to see you
return to me a wounded speckled fish.

The tide against the timber piles beat their hieroglyphics, scattering the swans on your urn to the nearest oblivion.
The sky’s darkness matches your grey ashes,
and the grit of the sea’s salt renders you colorless
as my hand skims over your lightness.

I cried, realizing you would never become
water, wind, or earth.
You would be just a swimmer caught in a riptide,
struggling to escape by navigating to the shore,
always coming back to me enough to pull you safely through
as you trusted I would do,
knowing God left me no other choice.  

Hooked to me, I carry your wound
as I watch schools of silverfish
swimming away from the pier.
I cap your urn,  cradling your ashes
to the warmth of my side.  
“I would never be through,”
I whispered to your ashes,
the sky, my silent father,
                      to myself.
Under the bardo of the sheltering sky
mist and fog cleave earth from heaven.
The green  liminal land  abscission’s itself-
shivering swallows from boughs,
causing the wiltering river reed
to bend away from the first frazil ice—
and the grazing horse to return to hay by
following the frosting road back to the barn.

The fifth season has arrived,
sneaking in between summer and fall,
changing everything green to yellow,
then to fire and ash—
suspending earth and air until
nature decides the next breath.


bardo:  (in Tibetan Buddhism) a state of existence between death and rebirth, varying in length according to a person's conduct in life and manner of, or age at, death.

Liminal:  Liminal space is the uncertain transition between where you've been and where you're going physically, emotionally, or metaphorically.

abscission:   the natural detachment of parts of a plant, typically dead leaves and ripe fruit.

Frazil:  soft or amorphous ice formed by the accumulation of ice crystals in water that is too turbulent to freeze solid.
Jonathan Moya Jun 2022
When her maman died
Marie flew ten hours to
the ancient French village
where the houses
steepled the church,
their mansard roofs
brown from neglect.  
The Weeping Willow
in front of maman’s
weathered hovel
did not match
Marie’s feelings.  
It never did.

Inside the furniture
had aged into antiques.
The handmade chaises
with ladder backs and
unadorned ticking,
French oak dinning table,
the vaisellier darker from
decades of hearth ash.

The rose print wallpaper had
faded to shadow bands,
the town print on the mantle
now almost sepia,
her first crib picture a fading
black and  white dream.

Maman’s single bed existed
pushed into the corner
of a windowless chambre,
almost a frenzied fever
blue room delusion of
Van Gogh’s last dying days.

Hanging alone in the closet was
maman’s noir widow’s dress,
the one Marie imagined maman
would be buried in.  That was
until Claire, the old neighbor next
door, gave Marie maman’s ashes
in a simple wooden box
with a gold filigreed clasp.
Pinned to the dress was Maman’s
will written in her eloquent hand
on unlined French folio.

These cinders, this shuddering land,
this dress with all its memories,
and grief would be her inheritance.  

Marie held the dress to her as
she returned to the archway
of the still open door.
The lace sleeves were  shorter
than she remembered,
but it would fit her very well.
Just beyond her, the country road
with its oaks grasping for union
stubbornly remained a horse trail.
Jonathan Moya Mar 2021
they took the body out
but the blood/bloodstain
stayed there.

the investigation begins.
that’s the police’s job.

but after the death
the cleaner cleans.

he cleans up blood,
pieces of bone,
skin,
maggots, flies
everything that
a corpse/body
leaves behind.
the smell
of decomposition/death  
will be gone
by the time
he finishes his work.

he has a very close
relationship to blood.
it’s something
that he respects.
he always tries
to keep in mind
that these remains
left on the floor,
this blood/bloodstain
belonged to someone.

what were they like
doesn’t interest him.
who were they
he’ll never really know.
he just owes them respect.

(every time he leaves
the atmosphere changes.
it changes
because nothing
reminds
them anymore
that there,
in that place,
someone
lost their life.

things will change
and the way they see
these objects
is sure to change as well.

of course they
still have that loss,
that pain,
but the way
they are
going to face it
is different.

his work is done
and theirs begins.)

he has a recurring dream
about his work.
he is driving at night.
the street is dark.
there are people
but he can’t see their faces.
he doesn’t know if
they are saying
hello
or
goodbye.

it is something
he would like to know
but he doesn’t have
enough time.
he thinks
that these
shadows/silhouettes
could be people
who have died.

at the end of his dream
he’s in the sea.
he’s trying
to get
to the surface,
but never
gets there.

it’s a cold,
dark
place.
he tries to move.
he tries to struggle.

suddenly,
he wakes up.
instead of being uneasy
he feels happy.
all around
is the shadows
of tombstones
leaving so many stains
on the grass
so much work
for him to do.
Jonathan Moya Mar 2019
a black cowl is over her
deliberately shuttered
in an unlit windowless room
so when I open my eyes
she is invisible,
a lemon whiff
peeling away,
a piano c note
on a whole beat
struck three times,
to tingle skin,
ping the tuning ear,
enough to know-now-ow-w
the first great rain of her,
the steps to her
now a thousand
clear receding lights
causing blinks
needing their
very own cowls,
leaving her-er-r
r last lost space
Jonathan Moya Jun 2019
A fossil in foam, five toes under a formed sole,
preserves the flight of a thousand border treks.

A layer of thermite and blood settles the right pad
of every hastily fled soul, a rusty preservation
of the ash of those who were enflamed.

Their left clod is encased with the dirt of broken roads,
the green of weeks of refuge in the forest from patrols,
the gray movement from villages to mountains and back.

At night they would mend and repair, knotting
broken y’s with twigs, rope threads, thatch,
anything that will last one more day.

The young’s heels are scuffed with the abrasions
left from the playful kicking parents endure
carrying them on their shoulders.

The old heels are full of the bristle
of slow moving donkeys led
by sons and daughters taking turns.

Under the shelter of grey canvas
their trek ends with fresh water,
food, a sturdy cot and new sandals.

The old plastic soles will rest in honor
on the mantle of their new hut,
ready for the next journey.
Jonathan Moya Jul 2024
I hate mowing the lawn,
hate the way it sends chinch bugs
flying to the stars after the rain.

In my dreams, however,  I have lots of land,
and delight in sculpting neat parallel rows
with my tractor- over and over, on and on,

aerating the start of warrens and burrows
for rabbits and woodchucks to finish their
tunnels, for deer to graze my flowers, weeds.

In the morning the milkweed blossoms,
bringing supping butterflies. At night,
the fireflies rise painting the darkness.

When the grass grows high and it’s time
to mow again, I will close my  eyes,
and feel the biting bugs and buzzing flies

mating dreamscapes in the coming dusk.
Like everyone else,
I can only step through the gate
my mother and father took to enter this world.
I must exist in the space their bodies made.  

Their walk set my path and determined my streets.
I hear their voices in the crunch of the compressed gravel of every footfall—echoes of their stories
I lived and never lived.

Where the dust remembers their steps,
I wander off until the road narrows,
and no clear way forward forces me to double back.  

What remains of them clings to me—
their names,  gestures, their quiet inheritance.
I step forward, but the gate never closes behind me.
Jonathan Moya May 2019
Trupie Pole, this Field of Death
is called in the old Slavic tongue,
shares its grief with the ruins
of the Catholic Church,
its relics long since relocated
to the hollowed knots of oaks
that populate a crooked forest.
Stick scarecrows, their bag heads
floating phantoms, protect the border.

Even the trees grow stunted where
the ground was soaked with blood,
limbs swaying towards each other
like separated twins begging
uselessly for reunion.  
Each blasted vein and half leaf
still echoes with the shriek,
the soil still leaks rust when trod,
memories of false sanguine
still glisten on overcast mornings,
and the howl of fog never dissipates,
while rumors of griffon vultures
returning from the dead
to paw for a taste of the catacombs
below are abundant as gnats.

In a wooden wagon the grandchildren
of blood huddle in desperate acts
of remembrance and procreation
ignoring the old woman with a babushka,
and somber dress fertilizing the field
with  tears for the thousandth time
for the sleeping twin under her boots.
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