Juan Pablo Mobili
July Fourth
What if today was the anniversary
of the landing on the moon,
would it outshine our independence?
What if we cheer our liberation
the same day we conquered the moon,
becoming the landlords of a meteorite?
What if I shaved my scalp
and my head’s topography
was identical to the landscape of a colony,
would that make me half-an-astronaut,
a patriot, or more daring?
What if I chose not to raise the flag?
Landscaping
Inspired by “Sometimes I Daydream of Flying Away”,
a painting by Jay Lynn Gomez
I did not know that I was escaping yet,
landed unprepared but refused to be extracted,
became a gardener and had wings the size that Hermes
wore on his sandals, useless mowing lawns.
I took notes: learn the stranger’s tongue,
think of poems while weeding endless driveways,
repeat my name the way they pronounce it where I’m from.
Now that My Son Has a New Heart
For my son Noah
They parted his sternum
like the Black Sea,
repaired his heart.
I was stunned
although my ear
is keen on tragedy.
I wonder why my gut
insisted on me keeping
a gun under my pillow,
wondering when they’d burst
through the front door,
although the war had ended.
Evidence of Life
There is proof
of what roamed once,
at the bottom of the river,
tracks of an old presence
“fifteen feet tall, close
to seven tons, as an adult,”
footprints deep like craters
of a moon at the bottom
of the Paluxy River in Texas,
what a drought reveals and
might have you remember
can be found underwater
or buried below the ground,
evidence of what no longer lives,
dinosaurs tracks, cathedral-like
skeletons of whales,
a fibula, a humerus,
a vertebra.
Atlas’s Wife
My grandmother lived in a house
facing the convent where young girls
learned the docility required
to bear one child after another.
That was the place that taught
my mother to be a woman,
that was the tattered map
her mother offered
to have her find the final shape
she had to take
to appease the dark.
My mother was my father’s muse
recipient of his brooding
atlas’s wife,
the weight he bore became
the heft she carried.
My father treaded the waters of his nature,
my mother wept exhausted
after saving the world,
all by herself
Juan Pablo Mobili was born in Buenos Aires, and adopted by New York. His poems appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, Hanging Loose Press, South Florida Poetry Journal, Louisville Review, Hong Kong, Review and The Wild Word (Germany), among others. His work received multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. His chapbook,
Contraband, was published in 2022.
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1 Comments:
Your poems are measured and evidence hard work and talent.
I particularly liked Atlat's Wife and Your Son's New Heart. First rate poetry.
Thank you.
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