Skip to main content

Carlos A. DeJuana

By
Day of the Dead

They walk among us,
snickering at our costumes
but secretly wishing
they could dress in our flesh.
While we lay marigolds
at their graves,
they sneak into our homes
through drafty windows
to catch up on Games of Thrones,
fast forwarding through commercials
so they can get back
before St. Peter locks the door.
Before they leave,
they rummage
through family albums
and flip through the photos on our phones
while we sleep,
desperately trying to remember
who they once were.

Carlos A. DeJuana spent nine years working as a journalist across Latin America before settling in Washington, DC, where he now works for the federal government.  His poetry has appeared in riverSedge, a literary journal published by the University of Texas-Pan American, and most recently in the online journal Synesthesia. He is married and has two daughters.  When he is not working, taking care of his girls, or writing, he greatly enjoys naps.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Amy Holman

By
My mother made herself the deer with a broken leg 
We saw a deer through the pane into someone else’s yard. The leg moved like a tube sock pinned to the hip  and half filled with sticks. I did not like to see it suffer,
either. She was upset —my mother —that no one helped  the doe. Was it a mother, too? As if we were the first to observe the scene. We weren’t. All had been told to
let her be. My mother had suffered a destruction  of the self, a divorce, and no one cared. That wasn’t true.  We were grown, on our own. I agree it was hard. Yet 
in those moments of a cold November day, we watched  a doe, disabled and enduring, walk across a yard and eat  a hedge. I wish she could have seen it like that.
Amy Holman is the author of the collection, Wrens Fly Through This Opened Window (Somondoco Press, 2010) and four chapbooks, including the prizewinning Wait for Me, I’m Gone (Dream Horse Press, 2005). Recent poems have been in or accepted by Blueline, concis, Gargoyle, The Westchester Revie…
2 comments
Read more

June Poem Reviews

By Rusty Barnes
I've had fiction and non-fiction reviews published in quite a few journals and have been a member of the National Book Critics Circle, when I could afford it. Therefore, I feel quasi-professional in those arenas. I don't necessarily feel that way about my poetry reviews. I have opinions, though, and in the interest of keeping my poetry-mind occupied during an otherwise stressful time in my life, I'd like to make you, the poetry world, an offer. If you mail me your chapbook or book--at least 24 pages but no more than 100 pages, self-published or traditional--I will post a review of between 150 and 300 words about it, as professionally as I can, in the following months. Promise. Mail me your book, get a review. Easy. If I get a huge response, I'll declare a cap and communicate it here. I would prefer to work from print copies. I hate reading poetry in PDF or MOBI--my preferred methods for prose--because the lines never break correctly and I find myself critiquing lineati…
Post a Comment
Read more

Gypsy Queen by Nicole Hennessy, reviewed by Rusty Barnes

By Rusty Barnes
Nicole Hennessy
Gypsy Queen
Crisis Chronicles Press
2019
60 pages
$12
Nicole Hennessy's Gypsy Queen, #109 from Crisis Chronicles Press, is a representative small press text in many ways. Filled with free-verse poems that tend toward the long and discursive, the book is arranged in such a way that the poems' performative aspects are in full effect, with strong voice and lots of sound-play. In "Vultures," a poem in five short sections, the speaker says to the potential partner "Tell me everything about me./Leave no room for me to tell you." which is a nice effect, as potential partners in the beginning usually say "tell me everything about you," so it's an intriguing beginning. We know this speaker is all ego from the get-go, doubling down on that initial statement by confessing just a few lines farther down:

I knew we'd walk to that cemetery together
I wanted to tell you something about myself
through those streets alone, along which I&#…
Post a Comment
Read more