Reckoning
Word count: 184
Paragraphs: 22
Admission here of my endeavor to dissemble a story
about the victors my quarter moon and crossbar my
factsheet glossy chevron I am enabled in place
even if I was never from Hamburg or Paris never
in Athens no matter how I obliterate my evolving
thoughts concentric with the fragrances of clean
and nearness to atrocity a measurement of days
and progress in terms I too obtain in amazement
sometime far sometime so in the urban sequence
inalienable begetting ever of the million chemical
components the color of asphalt tawny chlorophyll
grizzle I confess I suspect I unfriend a shy electorate
with something notable like evidence or argument
something noble for the influx of learning my lesson
in connection to belief and what teacher tells me
with no mind to correction of method why forfeit
the cruelty of forms I accept I concede I allow I
discomfort or are we are adjourned?—o hear ye
therefore ghost and guest in graphite timely untimely
Roberto Tejada is the author, most recently, of the poetry collection Why the Assembly Disbanded (Fordham University Press, 2022); Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastness (Noemi, 2019), a LatinX poetics on colonial settlement and cultural counter-conquest in art and literature of the Americas; as well as catalog essays in Celia Álvarez Muñoz: Obras (Art League Houston, 2020) and Allora & Calzadilla: Specters of Noon (Yale, 2021). The poems here are from his forthcoming book Carbonate of Copper.