“Valparaiso Sunrise”
By Matt Persike
Two-hundred moons
my life on the road has only just begun
Six-thousand tombs:
a stairway to the Valparaiso Sun
Eight bottles through
strewn broken and blue at the old Day’s soft demise
One crimson wave:
one heartbeat, slave to Valparaiso’s sunrise
"We would sit above the ocean spray through the earliest hours of the morning drinking pisco and watching the cobblestones change from Black to Blue to Burnt Orange in the sunrise creeping over the Eastern cerros at our backs before they finally decided on Gray for the waking hours. Maybe that’s why we slept through the daytime. Valparaiso used to receive more freight before the Panama Canal was shoved down Latin America’s throat, but the docks hustle and bustle from the bird’s eye. It is the city that gave birth to a Nobel-winning poet, and the port that holds some of my fondest recuerdos from Chile."
* * * * * * * * * *
“How Far Afield?”
By Ed O’Casey
we found him with his words
cut in two
their ink draining from the page onto the field
and seeping around the corners
into the channels of our insteps
his mouth fixed in an infinite
yawn both eyes at half mast
perhaps to commemorate himself
we saw dozens
hundreds like him but for the fact
that he had a vocabulary and was damned
to share it with the uncomprehending soil
our destination still days off
we wandered the loosely knit fields
like the tick of a chthonian clock
or the geometry of isolation
[Ed O´Casey also submitted a poem for April 3.]
