Ekphrasis on the Cover of There Is No Enemy

John A. Nieves
| poetry

 

We’re made of weeds blue as empty homes. I left
alone from where the old fires barely burn, slid through
the night like the front lawn was a road. I found this

dark and the savage shapes it grows. And it bent me
forward, fed me the secrets in my bones. And I lost
hope, rose through the black sky like a tower. And I’m

a stone with my window in my shadow and it’s too
small to climb back inside. This is how my spine found
the moonlight, my thickened arms pressed into topsoil.

At home became a dream and I knew I never would
sleep again. I’m still made of weeds but now my seeds
are windblown and the old fires have gone to smoke.

John A. Nieves’ poems appear in journals such as the Iowa Review, American Poetry Review, and Hopkins Review. A 2024 Pushcart Prize winner, his first book, Curio, won the Elixir Press Prize. He is an associate professor at Salisbury University and an editor of The Shore Poetry.

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