Steven Sanchez| Breathe

Breathe. Poems by Steven Sanchez, selected as Number 10 in Volume Five of our Editor’s Series.

Publication:  June 28, 2023 [100 copies]
27 pages
ISBN 978-1-960693-01-3
$ 12.00

cover image by Paul Bilger.

Steven Sanchez is the author of of Phantom Tongue (Sundress   Publications, 2018), chosen by Mark Doty for the Rochelle Ratner Memorial Award. He is also the author of two chapbooks, To My Body (Glass Poetry, 2016) and Photographs of Our Shadows (Agape Editions, 2017). He is a CantoMundo Fellow, Lambda Literary Fellow, and the winner of the inaugural Federico García Lorca Poetry Prize for an emerging Latinx poet. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Agni, The Missouri Review, and other publications.

Resurrection

for Christopher Lynne: Fresno, California

In this basin still filled with rainwater
a flock of geese skims my brown face, haloed
in an oil slick rainbow. Silt seals pollutants
like a casket, allows what’s pure to pass
through earth. A detective’s camera snapped
your body, the drag marks, and your phone.
You called your sister. Your voice cut out.
They said you waded into the water, ruled it
a suicide, as if gay men must go by
baptism, with a man’s left hand crossing
your chest, his right covering your mouth,
his weight bearing down. Remember, to hold
your breath is a conscious act. You don’t have
to die to drown. Inhale.

[ Our thanks to the Texas Review for first publishing this poem. ]
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