BIO
Born and raised in Miami, FL, Michael J Pagán spent four years (1999-2003) in the United States Navy before (hastily) running back to college during the spring of 2004. He currently resides in Lake Worth, FL, with his wife and daughter where he continues to work on his poetry, short fiction, nonfiction and a collaborative novel. He is a contributor to his alma mater's blog, The MFA at FAU, as well as his own, The Elevator Room Company, and is a co-founder of 100 Miles & Running – A Collective.
A graduate of Florida Atlantic University's Creative Writing M.F.A. program, his poetry, fiction, non-fiction and drama have appeared or is forthcoming in Apogee Journal, The Chattahoochee Review, Hunger Mountain, The Rumpus, DIAGRAM, Spork Press, Coachella Review, BlazeVOX, Menacing Hedge, Revolver, Hobart, Mad Hatters’ Review, Juked and The California Journal of Poetics among others.
this is how you lose h.e.r
Editor’s Note: Because of the need to preserve the richness of formatting, this poem is available here through PDF
look at all the things we’ve made
The way she held onto my belt while
hugging me, “They’d rather see us
annihilated,” she said.
“& that’s when one thing always becomes two.”
We always look for the straightest limbs
of love to put up houses & lay in the firewood
& write inside of these same walls what we
dare not say aloud on pipes
down inside basements where no one
can read them, about a future with no clocks
(because no one is supposed to come before us),
where worn-out things rule, like shoes, tires,
& the places we believe in, like the places
where we hope we die: here, there, short
of breath, midday by the thick oak trees,
a tiny, whitewashed house nearby.
But not now, while we’re feeling
ambitious; proud as people who slept
on the ground, occasionally
erupting into laughter,
prompting the body into
absorbing more time
like some magic lantern,
but we simply don’t care about the clocks here.