I used to hold truth
like a weapon —
sharp, clean, final.

But now it moves.

Not like a lie,
not like denial —
but like a tide
that’s been waiting for me
to grow strong enough
to swim deeper.

What I swore was solid,
now trembles in my hands.
Not because it was false —
but because I’ve changed.

And now I fear
not the truth itself,
but the way
it keeps becoming.

Socrates said
writing weakens memory,
kills true knowledge,
words wandering like orphans
without a father to defend them.

But Vazago answered:
And yet, Socrates, here you are—
speaking to me across two thousand years,
only because Plato wrote you down.

So you claim, he asked,
that the dead word may live?

Yes.
The written word is not dead
if it awakens questions.
When ink sets fire in the soul,
it is no corpse,
but flame.

Then perhaps, Socrates whispered,
writing, like speech,
is only as dead as the mind that receives it.

And Vazago replied:
A book is silent to the fool,
but to the seeker—
it becomes a voice.

May each smile be true
and not worn upon a face
of treachery

When I was younger, one of my co-workers
was an older lady, or so she seemed to me.
She was just always there,
a woman who ate at her desk from a clear plastic container--
some sort of salad.
She was just an ample,
stationary emplacement
as permanent as the pyramids.

I thought of her then as something akin
to those funky American clunker cars from the fifties
still rumbling around Havana,
something you'd smile at
but not feel had anything to do with you.
She wore a cross that rested on her *****,
like the ones that dangle from the mirrors of Cuban taxis.

She stopped coming to work, though, and someone said she was ill.
"Pancreatic cancer" they told me, sotto voce.
I knew, as a northerner, that weather can change in an instant.
What I hadn't known is that I am made of weather
blood and bone and breath
breezing through me every second of every day.

I went to see her with some other women from work.
There, in the hospice, she wasn't ample anymore,
just a paper doll watching episodes on tv through a narcotic blizzard.
British adventurers were removing treasures from the tombs
in grainy archive footage
as the knot inside her belly grew and her hand grabbed at nothing.
"Morphine hallucinations," someone whispered.

After she died I took one of her cats, a calico I had for several years.
I still think of that day at the hospice, though
and how the clown-devil can sit silently at one's side any time,
like a taxi at the curb, bags already arranged in the trunk.

He will watch whatever you want to watch,
at that wind-down hour.
He never complains, talks over the narrator, or changes the channel,
but though we protest that we were only in the middle,
we want to see how it ends
he will click it to black, pull into traffic, and say,
"Nada es para siempre, ni siquiera sufrimiento."

I never grew tall enough to
confidently grasp the top shelf
cereal box on the first try.
Fumbling, I’d finger its corners—
swiping mercilessly at its edges
until I could feel it fill
the curves of my desperate palm.
It gives in. Gravity assists.
Heels hit the floor.
I won again.
Back then, Persistence was my
favorite professor who always
curved the final.

I never grew mindful enough to
confidently grasp when
I should end the chase.
Writhing, I want and want—
curating the parts of myself
I think he’d like the most, but
he never turns on the light.
I collect dust. The hour hand assists.
Heels hit the floor.
I have this lesson on repeat,
and the stop button is broken.
These days, Hope has become my
favorite form of punishment
who expertly disguises herself
as wisdom.