BIO
Marc Huerta Osborn is a Mexican-American writer from the East Bay Area with serious questions about inheritance, language, trauma, and love. In his poems, he plumbs the depths of intergenerational trauma and amnesia, but also explores the ways that art empowers us to fit the fragments of a broken past back together into new, hopeful wholes. He has published poetry and prose in collaborations with artists incarcerated at San Quentin, teaches creative writing to youth of all ages, and has had his poetry featured in Rust and Moth.
nyquil
at midnight her sighs will make harp sounds: the waves
will burrow through cold ground and spaceless
miles, to the place where tides are born.
I could taste it the first time you loosed opal
rowers out across the moon
waters; how as paddles they flashed
ghost feathers, ablaze in mercury.
stalks of steam, sunflower blossoms, surface tension
of shimmering pools—shadows
dance against the curtains.
just before dawn the rowers settled into reefs, their oars burned
down to the grips. sulfur smoke curled into the
cradle of my tongue. craters, fading from sight,
became your eyelids, alumbrados por la aurora.
gasps decline from flight to pupil
puddle, reflecting two needles stitching
starwork to glass, over and over again,
inching in phase, gas
to solid, each split second spent stirring awake.
did you see the rowers?