I’ve logged more experience than most with simplicity and the complexity you discover inside simplicity, minimalism and asocial behavior, endurance and landscape.
Here is the truth: I think some deep wisdom inside me (a) sensed the stress, (b) was terrified for me, and (c) gave me something new and hard to focus on in order to prevent me from lapsing into a despair coma — and also to keep me from having a jelly jar of wine in my hand.
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Martín Espada has published more than twenty books as a poet, essayist, and translator. He is the editor of the poetry collection What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump and a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His poem in this issue will appear in his forthcoming collection, Floaters.
Stride from the crowd to seize the president’s arm before another roll of paper towels sails away. Thunder Spanish obscenities in his face. Banish him to a roofless rainstorm in Utuado, so he unravels, one soaked sheet after another, till there is nothing left but his cardboard heart.