Diaspora Sonnet 42

BY OLIVER DE LA PAZ

I close the shutters, leave a wink

of light to keep from burning down

my paper house. The seams are creased.

I move about in my tattered plight

slowly. Elbow on the table, skin puckered

makes a kissing sound as I lift my arm

to shade my eyes from beams cutting through.

This home is not the interior I had wanted.

Slowly baking air at noontime, despite

my insistence on shadow—I am hot

in the shade of my dwelling. There are dogs

outside and I hear them speaking their

breathy language. Their humid speech.

Their deliberations about staying or going.

Oliver de la Paz is the author of five collections of poetry: Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby, Requiem for the Orchard, Post Subject: A Fable, and The Boy in the Labyrinth. He also co-edited A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry. Currently, Oliver serves as the founding co-chair of the Kundiman advisory board. His work has been published or is forthcoming in journals and anthologies such as The Pushcart Prize Anthology, American Poetry Review, Tin House, The Southern Review, New England Review, and Poetry. He teaches at the College of the Holy Cross and in the Low-Residency MFA Program at PLU.

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