man mending memory

words dripping sick in mud

café con leche brown on a gray

Saturday afternoon when the wind

has shaken naked the orange

tree after eight hours of rain:

some hurtful words my dad tells my mother

my teeth screech against

the sky           and I sit outside

under the washed-out moon

waxed on my chest full of summers

swamped in yellows and greens

and all its concomitant abundances:

they rest impervious to the suicide of day

Elidio La Torre Lagares earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Texas-El Paso, and a Ph.D. in Caribbean Literature. He has published several collections of poetry in Spansih. His work in English has appeared in American Poetry Journal (New York), Ariel Chart (New York), The Pangolin Review (Mauritius), Sargasso (University of Puerto Rico), Revista Centro Jornal (City University of New York), Azahares (University of Arkansas), and Malpaís Review (New Mexico), among others. He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize Award in 2018 for his poems: “natural disasters #2: wooden fish ears” and “dead father in the storm.” His book of poems Wonderful Wasteland is University of Press of Kentucky’s new voices selection in poetry for 2018 and will be launched in Spring 2019. He currently teaches for the Department of Comparative Literature and the Department of English at the UPR Río Piedras Campus, Faculty of Humanities.