Poetry

Do you know what time it is?

by  Vickie Vértiz
A photograph of the top of a border wall and the blue sky above
Photo: Centrifuga / Flickr

after a photograph by Sally Mann and Detention Center Concentration Camps

evening fliesI always do They sell candy crack pipes at the liquor store—where have you been? I used to be safe and sage among the wolves Now this cage is too small And I move to live So when I dream, I necklace storied playgrounds Under a pebble roll of clouds I am a doe like a doe is a buck Horns sprout through my skull I open one door slide open another, then another and it’s just empty warehouses Piled high with Mylar blankets But no one is running a marathon except for us And these mornings I don’t fall The sky is a blue that hurts The rectangle sky from a balcony I can’t see over I see through it We’ve been falling from that sky forever These mornings I leap and evening flies

     


The child of immigrants, Vickie Vértiz has had work published in the New York Times magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Her book Palm Frond with Its Throat Cut won the 2018 PEN America Prize in poetry. She teaches writing at UC–Santa Barbara.

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