Nicholas Fuenzalida | Two Poems | Glass: A Journal of Poetry

Lost & Found
July 2017
edited by Jennifer Met

Nicholas Fuenzalida

Two Poems

New Dimension

There's hardly time to speak of anything but ourselves as mist grasps windows, inhaling the day. The streets below us have hardened, unrecognizable to me now when once they seemed like your family's fields in spring, waiting to be tilled. In this city, where people travel underground, the air is filtered through pretzel dough and scarves in the shops that repeat themselves, like your father when he forgets how old we are. We rise through stairwells, your back silhouetted by the fog, and I think of cold Nebraska, where the earth froze the day after Christmas. Your father took my hand, led me to a corner closet, so I could see the rifle he bought for you the day you were born. Watching you now, on these streets wide as the fields outside your door, I cannot help myself from thinking — I, too, misunderstood you once.

Nearly Finished

In the bed of our mother's truck, my brother's leg has opened. The fat glistens through blood and rain, each bump causing the white tissue to protrude a little more. His face pales so much like our father's, and I stuff more wads of shirt into him, brought closer to his body than before. Over the wind and rain on the truck's tinny frame, I hear the radio — year-long fire seasons expected — and my mother nods along. By the time we arrive at the emergency room, we've nearly forgotten there are worlds outside of our own, and we are told we'll have to wait. In the waiting room everyone looks tired and broken, like the swing set our father built when he thought it might help us learn certain limits. The television in the corner chirps at a volume too low to follow and the nurses flit past, escorting patients to rooms behind double doors. My brother is taken back, leaving my mother and me to run through the day in reverse — the hour it took to get here, the blood on the grass, the lawnmower sputtering to a stop. And before that, the last time we saw our father, him telling my brother over hard-scrambled eggs there are some things a man must learn for himself. And before that, him telling the three of us he had somewhere else to be.

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Lost & Found is published by Glass Poetry Press as part of Glass: A Journal of Poetry. This project publishes work that was accepted by journals that ceased publication before the work was released.
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