My name is Podrigotouma and one of the things I love about poetry and notice about poetry

is that some people write the same poem over and over again in different books as they

keep on returning to a moment of love as they try to capture the expression of joy and

the moment that something happened that opened them up to the world in a way where their

life has never been the same since.

Father by Carlos Andrés Gomez

In the basement of the crack house I used to visit as an outreach worker on 121st Street

in Harlem. I was convinced he refused to travel north of 96th. I wrote a letter to Joanna

on her mission in Taiwan detailed each irrefutable piece of evidence proving we are all in fact

alone. Told her about the nine-year-old orphan forced to sell her body for three years before

ending up just off-time square discarded in a dumpster. I told her about the eldest son

who answered a burglar's call and was shot paralyzed from the waist down. I asked her

about drought and famine and endless civil wars what lessons does his book refuse.

When her heart rate dropped by half in less than a minute the population of our cramped

hospital room tripling in a handful of seconds I grasped for anything that would keep

me upright. At first the wall, cool and steady demanding my body ascend beyond what seemed

possible. Then, nothing. No one. I stood in the waiting room of the or or waiting to be

called in to find out if my child had survived. I spent each second trying to pull tiny

shoe coverings over my two large feet. I confessed every wrong of my life to an empty,

overlit room of steel and sterile instruments that all reflected back distorted versions

of myself. I fumbled for any prayer I could remember hoping that I had all along been

mistaken about the hollow blackness of the infinite sky. I never wanted so badly to

...