Loss
Lately I have been a gap.
Moth clouds follow me to bed.
I counted them: twenty, fifty, block, choke.
In the room where I used to sleep
a breath hangs low on the bed
and hoarsens the room.
No one knows where the air is
charged and released into the world,
but it thistles.
This is how breathing fills a house
with family: breathing to draw
the buzzing to its source
and breathing to lacquer a plugged maze.
How a house fully beamed and walled
is not a house, but a husk.
How a life in the span of a few breaths
becomes a clockless thing.
Copyright © 2018 by Rodney Gomez. This poem originally appeared in Citizens of the Mausoleum (Sundress Publications, 2018). Used with permission of the author.
Rodney Gomez
Rodney Gomez is the author of Arsenal with Praise Song (Orison Books, 2020), Geographic Tongue (Pleiades Press, 2020), winner of the Pleiades Press Visual Poetry Series. He works in mobility demand management as Executive Director of Parking and Transportation at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and lives in McAllen, Texas, where he serves as poet laureate.