By: Jonathan Andrew Pérez, Esq.
DOWNY WOODPECKER IN MISSISSIPPI
The dialogues: (n.) a common misconception that we are made of thoughts, regulated by ideas, but in fact exist in the world outside, flesh, bone, past
The Law: Next spring I am every dead thing
Glass, conceits, hot in the frozen tundra, a tincture like heraldry
Poetics: give me quiet like multiple frames or mirrors,
Next season brilliant-edged, sound like music, buried out in the Lincoln County, I am Lamar Smith.
The Law: what should change is the want to escape, clear-edged, imperfect, capitalism, materialism.
A volley between the tundra swans, the clicking of bitter sweet gum tree by the woodpecker’s beak.
Poetics: come down from the tree, détente of this world and the next, M is for Mississippi and Murder.
The croak in the composed fields are three white men’s boots hauling guilt home like music as certain as night.
The Law: what comes undone is the flying buttress of heaven against the stars,
Stormer is a color of the soul, carried around by a pallet holding up the specter of guilt long after
the assailants went to rest.
DELOREAN STATE PRISON
All things pop
A few hundred feet from his resurrection,
DeLorean rolls up to the prison
inmate No. 5400 has no harbor of
absolution but a time for execution to push back to a future untold -
Do, at midnight, 1.21 gigawatts
Ride out
no savior to ream
erased mysteriously
from the State Penalty Review Commission final decision.
The execution was at 2000 volts
Carolina planned to give 2,000 volts
John Louis Evans in 1982 was shocked for 30 seconds before the electrode broke
His mouth was smoking.
A brief history of executions: the Guillotine, the Chair, Noose.
1999, Allen Lee “Tiny” Davis, 300 pounds,
Blood poured out of his mouth during the Florida execution
Four guards strapped him to the chair.
Back to the future: He sits in the tent
In purgatory thinking on his sins, what
Little knowledge of doc’s bullet proof vest
the final Sunday flying out choppy waters
of the sky in a Delorean.
How in Carolina, Thinks of daddy and examines
spring peepers, and nabs a worm for feeder,
return to the future – before he turned to a life of crime
kiss mama, say you’re sorry to miss it
all the things pop,
you’ll utter on the hover craft board
never did say
no record of it, no Country, nor history can name it: break out.
From THE WABAN Series
The Waban: constructed in 1852 outside San Quentin, the Waban was a 19th century prison ship that held roughly
68 inmates
The light reflecting the incarnations beneath the grey Pacific,
Like a grisaille shadow the hull, cracked keel, the end of pioneer shows.
A Consigner: the State stood to gain much more than rolling cartographic
Exterior, a last remaining Brown bear hulked from the shore at the figurehead slow.
Low and round, laboring gold-fever, men meditated on how to launch into the pastiche
escape banditry, violence, a few waited in the refractions
resurrected images in wet puddles on cherry and chestnut planks in dank heat
Plowed sounds of dolphins in the nautical miles, by columns of masts, held in anticipation.
Remodeled the ship was a mastodon to American Destiny, like a sloping mountainous rock
Vermillion flags waned in the port, the sun was a bull fire, so others could steer clear
So no shadow of themselves lied on its grave forecastle, away the innocent men from bad stock
Never lived and promised their family more than infamy, the ship downward held steer.
Jonathan Andrew Pérez, Esq. has published poetry online and in print in Prelude, The River Heron Review, The Write Launch, Meniscus Literary Journal, Rigorous Literary Journal, The Florida Review’s Latinx publication, Panoply Magazine, the Raw Art Review, Junto Magazine, Watermelanin, Cold Mountain Review’s Justice Issue, Yes, Adelaide Literary Magazine, Mud Season Review, Meat for Tea: The Valley Review, The Esthetic Apostle, The Piltdown Review, The Tulane Review, The Tiny Journal, The Westchester Review, Metafore Magazine, Silver Needle Press, and Swimming with Elephant. He has poems forthcoming in Projector Magazine, Cape Cod Poetry Review, The Chicago Quarterly Review, The Worcester Review, Abstract: Contemporary Expressions, Pamplemousse.
Jonathan was selected by The Virginia Quarterly Review 2018 for a workshop with Jericho Brown and Cave Canem in 2018 and 2019 for workshops. He is a 2019 Pushcart Prize in Poetry Nominee.
He has a day job as a prosecutor. He has a popular Instagram-poet handle: hillicon_justice.
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