Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal - Issue 34

Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal was born in Mexico. His lives in California and works in the mental health field in Los Angeles. His poetry has appeared in print and online since the 1980's. His work has appeared in Blue Collar Review, Fixator Press, Impspired, Ink Sweat and Tears, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Mad Swirl, and Unlikely Stories. His books and chapbooks have been published by Alternating Current Press, Deadbeat Press, FourFeathers Press, KendraSteiner Editions, New Polish Beat, Poet's Democracy, Rogue Wolf Press, and Ten Pages Press (e-book).

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A Fragment

I found a fragment 

of your poem online.

The sun and its decline 

were in your first line.

I imagine you saw that 

with your naked eye.

The second line 

described the sea

and the sounds it

makes. I would have

settled on the desert 

and its own sounds.

In the third line you

used gold as a color,

and in the fourth line 

its tint as twilight

took the sky for ransom.

Across The Ocean

Silence travels across the ocean.

It is enveloped in the foam and

gentle waves as if words meant 

nothing but a sunken ship’s non-

survivors’ fate at the bottom of

the sea. There death meets the

unlucky and the forgotten. They

are captured in a painting that

only a blind man could see on

paper half eaten by moths along 

their journey toward a warm

lighthouse’s light bulb in another

drawing never to be seen again.

Stay Still

Still like this rock, I will stay.

Still as a lazy dog with one leg,

I will not even wag my tail.

I will not blink my eyes

and I will not open them.

I will stay under a spell

and sit like a clichéd log.

I will not mutter a word.

I will not weave a tale.

I will let death inspect me.

It knows it is not my time.

Don’t bet a dime against me.

I will win the bet for sure.

No amount of humming

and buzzing at my ear will

make me move. The plan

is to stay still for an hour.

This is what I want to do.

The hour will seem like a day.

I will be connecting with

silence. I will be like a

cloud in a still photograph.

The dust will cling to me.

I will brush it away soon enough.

Still like a cactus flower I will be.

I will be like a mute cricket.

I will write about the experience.