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"Blue Fire", "Variation on Gwendolyn Brooks", and "Self-Portrait" by Ulyses Razo

Blue Fire


When in the morning, the star grass

Freezes like frostweed,

I feel at home.

Save for this brown button-up, which chokes

Half my neck. These clothes

Are a costume, and though all clothes are (costumes),

Some suit me better,

& I know, like Plato his Forms,

That my costumes elude me in the closets of strangers.

Nothing

Of mine fits,

Nor do I like anything

I own.

The dog is wrong

The food is wrong

The furniture suffocates

& this house is too small for its fire, which burns

Within, & whose flames’ tongues

Are too long & too blue

For the square feet

They’ve been given.


Variation on Gwendolyn Brooks





First fail. Then fiddle.

Read a poem. Decide to mimic.

Fail. Do this first. Then fiddle.

Take someone else’s idea, try

making it your own. Realize

you can’t. Let it go. Let years

go by.


Find what you think is your voice.

Find out it isn’t. Find out

it both is & isn’t.

Return to stealing.

This time fail at failing.

Steal well. Steal

only that which you need.

Know it was never an issue. Know

you were the issue. Change. Know

how to change.


Self-Portrait


He wants to be

a brutal old man, everything

Robert Creeley has described

in his perfect poem, Self-

Portrait, which one would like to be

a portrait of one’s self.

But it is not. One is not

a brutal old man. One is

a young man

who wants to be a brutal old man.

Who wants to be aggressive, & mean

spirited. I am

a young man who does not want to be

young, perhaps because he is not

young enough, & so would select

death, instead. Or perhaps because he does not feel

young, does not feel it is right to be

young

& therefore happy. Perhaps

he can forefeel

the dread,

the slaughter-room

babies must enter one day.

Vonnegut spoke of the artist

as a canary

keeling over

in the presence of disease.

When I was still

unborn, I wrapped a cord

around my neck

& hoped life would choke me

the moment

it happened.




The son of immigrants, Ulyses Razo is a graduate from the University of Washington, Seattle. He writes poetry, and has written fiction, creative nonfiction, film criticism, and translations of Spanish language prose and poetry. He has also worked with collage and erasure. His work has been published or is forthcoming in: Barzakh Magazine, Outcast Press, MORIA, The Metaworker, Life and Legends, and Months to Years. A librarian, he has lived in London and Seattle, and currently resides in Washington.


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