LC Gutierrez

Recovery Program: Step 2

Would I wake up
to nothing?

Hold faith in my mouth
like moist toast

while oceans of my childhood dry off
in dwindling whirls?

Dancing padlocks/ Siamese fish
cannibalize when I open my eyes.

Would die, is the irony, to follow this eternity
that unfurls around me. Would grip

to the handles of blade-shaped pain
while the sky settles in the sickly

shades of a fickle suicide.
Dreamt when they screamed  "Let go, and Let God"

I was already falling. Had found myself
a melon halved- my fruit nowhere

but to perish under a probing sun.
Dreamt I found an address not looking.

Eagerly stepped through the door:
a chime sounds. Admired the plenitude of wares

stocked on shelves. Bountiful, then awakened
like a drunk, with my pockets turned inside out.

LC Gutierrez is a product of many places in the Southern USA and the Caribbean. An erstwhile academic, he now writes, teaches and plays trombone in Madrid, Spain. His work has been published in a number of wonderful journals, and is most recently published or forthcoming in Notre Dame ReviewSugar House Review, Trampoline JournalRed Ogre Review, New York Quarterly and Delta Poetry Review.  He is a poetry reader for West Trade Review.