My brother says You can’t eat poetry
as his worn boot presses the shovel’s edge
into the dry earth. He digs out the stump
of an American oak whose roots are broad
but shallow. Look at the birds in the trees,
how they sing without worry. My brother
sighs: he knows they are songs of hunger.
The last stay last, and the dead stay dead.
The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard
under a silent god. Tomorrow in chains,
sold for a mark on your hand of a Cross
and still, show up to work. The shovel’s edge,
the dry earth. We drown in different seas,
restless. His worries pour out like water.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 28, Issue 3.
Pablo Otavalo is from Cuenca, Ecuador, and now lives and writes in Illinois. A recipient of the 2013 and 2014 Illinois Emerging Writers Competition prize, his work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, RHINO Poetry, Jet Fuel Review, Structo Magazine, No Tender Fences: An Anthology of Immigrant & First-Generation American Poetry, and other publications. We must find what we revere in each other.
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