Catalogue Beginning with a Line from Marcelo Hernandez Castillo

Photo By Radek Homola

The music stopped playing years ago, but we’re still dancing.
The naked maple still has so many leaves to release before

we have any right to call it dead. How our children out back
wildly thrash angels into snow without losing their divinity.

Last summer, the field we’ve worked generations until it no longer
resembles a field crept its green up the rusty machinery, choked

our blades, overtook the unlit burn barrel, & we are no longer
able to torch the photographs we’d prefer to forget. Nothing

about the past has failed to hurt. Still, erasure. Still, the boughs
hold tight their nooses & moonlight finds a way through them.

When my mother died, I thought like a clear-cut forest the fire
in my lungs would refuse to spread. That I’d forget the weight

of her hand over mine carefully slicing apples from their core,
leaving each seed undamaged & replantable. When my daughter

taught me her gender, her music grew so damn true I almost cried
the dust off the ill-fitting name we’d given her as a gift. As a gift, she

guides my hard hand into the soft indent she’s left. Yes, the world stopped
listening years ago. Still, the field breaks green through the snow beneath us.