Octavio Quintanilla
(North Texas – USA)
[There will always be a city]
There will always be a city
that will never belong to you.
A place where no one likes to walk
the moonlight on a leash.
Beware: Someone
will always try to cut
your legs so you can kneel
and learn a new prayer.
If you leave the city,
it’s because you’re no longer in love.
If you sleep, you wake to call
the past by its old name.
There’s always a name,
an utterance invisible to sound.
Once you leave, you forget
how to return.
You’ll find yourself in a small village
where doors are left unlocked,
where dogs chase chickens to their death,
where men invite strangers to sleep
with their wives.
They, too, want to return to the cities
they never wanted to abandon
in the first place.
On days the world ceases
to astonish you,
and you think hard about leaving,
you find yourself
in an old love letter:
Dear ________,
and then you have nowhere to go,
no one to call to see
if you’re still home.
Vigil
Someone is dying
far from your sleep,
embracing a pillow,
coughing pieces
of your name.
They have faith
you’ll come to kneel
at their side,
bring a crucifix,
a string of sunlight
between your fingers.
Someone is dying
far from your sleep.
You embrace a pillow,
clench their name
between your teeth.
[In Your image, Lord, You made fire]
In Your image, Lord, You made fire,
flames that eat the center
of my neighbor’s home.
He cries and sits on a chair
someone brought him
in an act of kindness.
He needs kindness now
before his grief reaches deep to call
Your name in blame.
We stand around and watch
firemen water the black weeds
of smoke that remain.
They work in silence, efficiently,
each to his task,
some of them shuffling in sober sadness
as if the house that turned to ash
had been their own.
Later, on the news, a reporter tries
to explain, to those who were not there,
what took place and what was lost.
The report ended with a still frame
of my neighbor, Lord,
sitting on the chair,
his back to the world,
men and women surrounding him,
some placing their hands on his shoulders,
watching his face fill with light.
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Bio:
Octavio Quintanilla’s work has appeared in Salamander, RHINO, Alaska Quarterly Review, Southwestern American Literature, The Texas Observer, Texas Books in Review, and elsewhere. He is a CantoMundo Fellow and holds a PhD from the University of North Texas. Currently, he teaches Literature and Creative Writing in the MA/MFA program at Our Lady of the Lake University. He is a regular interviews contributor to Voices de La Luna: A Quarterly Poetry and Arts Magazine and author of the poetry collection, If I Go Missing (Slough Press, 2014).