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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