Phase Lines
BY JORDAN KELLER-MARTINEZ
I am tired and cannot find you. When I get in the water
they pull me out. For now we’re only casual onlookers.
See how afraid I am? The war is over, but begins again
by another name. I don’t have patience to watch the sun
tip over the horizon. We are fragrant of each other.
I lick the wound clean. We are fragrant of each other.
I don’t have patience to watch the sun tip over
the horizon. The war is over, but begins again
by another name. See how afraid I am? For now
we’re only casual onlookers. When I get in the water
they pull me out. I am tired and cannot find you.
Before, You Could Go to the Hospital and See Him
BY JORDAN KELLER-MARTINEZ
Just before his suicide, he triaged everything away with intimacy.
He wrapped a newspaper around his leftover apples,
a crop of green he shined across his shirt for us.
We’re supposed to stay alive now that he’s not.
Everyone in passing mentions that to us.
His last meal was a fish limp over a too-small plate.
After, he reconstructed the bones, tampering them into something other than fish.
We came back to him, and his room was lit differently by the sun.
Without a clean sheet to use, we could only partially cover the body with his uniform jacket.
Why, on his way home across the sand, did he drag Aphrodite’s marble head in a fisher’s net?
Viewing a Cherry on My Return from Afghanistan
BY JORDAN KELLER-MARTINEZ
Do I always
smell before I taste
what taste has lived and will
live while others have died?
Look how I hold this cherry
in my palm or by its stem
and think, why eat,
and, what absence belongs where.
Look how my palm with the cherry
resembles cerise, resembles a poppy
I cut, which otherwise
would not have died
like this. Here I
just have the dead
weight of a scentless cherry.
