Vita Nuova

in the book of the life I have made, my memory would
appear cursed, and halfway, by affairs

and irrational fears: Capitalism in inescapable. We were popular
with men knew.

Light sticks my white tennis shorts,
and life feels life in a city for each still visible and waiting.

This is the 21st century.

We never leave the life is elsewhere. The clemency of men disapears
as does the light, tarring the roofs.

From The Life Assignment (Four Way Books, 2020) by Ricardo Alberto Maldonado. Copyright © 2020 by Ricardo Alberto Maldonado. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of Four Way Books.

The Commodities Market

Where one finds poetry, one finds the Lord,
God of Epic, a golden instrument on Our Lord’s plums, God the body,

pelt of Our Lord, red cap for red God, tree of the Heavens.

Remember, José Daniel? The God we engraved on our desks?
Christ of Our Lord, Christ of Our Children.

Lord’s denominator in the Lord’s arithmetic, a pair of children scissors.
God at our borders, the salt of Our Lord, God’s ocean of cotton, of sugar.

Ricardo Alberto Maldonado

2019

In Defense of the Life Assignment

I started at the surface, feeling about my face,
the low jawbone my mother had given me
as weapon against austerity. Two decades before,
my father had died. I was desperate under summer’s
isosceles. A fragile machine descended
with a yellowing haze on the city.
Whom had I been then, but the sediment inside

Ricardo Alberto Maldonado

2021

I Give You My Heart

I find myself on my feet with fifteen leaves.

Everything carries its own light on the walls.

I woke up being hit. The afternoon,
suffocating as the death of cows. My heart
was opened between cemeteries of moon.

The parasites. The drizzle. The mud crowning
the undergrowth with immense sadness.

Ricardo Alberto Maldonado

2017

Poems

Vita Nuova

More by this poet

The Commodities Market

In Defense of the Life Assignment

I Give You My Heart

Poems

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Vita Nuova

More by this poet

The Commodities Market

In Defense of the Life Assignment

I Give You My Heart

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