Social Distancing
with design by Anthony Cody

Copyright © 2020 by Juan Felipe Herrera. Design by Anthony Cody. Originally published with the Shelter in Poems initiative on poets.org.
with design by Anthony Cody

Copyright © 2020 by Juan Felipe Herrera. Design by Anthony Cody. Originally published with the Shelter in Poems initiative on poets.org.
Yet the peach tree
still rises
& falls with fruit & without
birds eat it the sparrows fight
our desert
burns with trash & drug
it also breathes & sprouts
vines & maguey
There are baby thoughts in the shape of seaweed & pirate knives they float over strips of shores & curl into a rainy parasol where a laboring red papaya truck awaits & there are the thoughts of Staff Sergeant Melanie Lippman—she's back from Afghanistan & cheers as a rhomboid ball burns through the flags of space— but she notices distant jagged zones on fire where the Company battles & there are the thoughts of a father Don Jose Emiliano in plaid with water on his face—his only son on the wet field for the first time—he is a man now how his fury t