Litany: Offering
Here we are by the creek and by the river. Here we have
synced ourselves and found the words to the song the bees
are singing, the falling leaves, the just-dark sky. Here
the patterns climb the doorframes, crowd the sidewalks, slip
from the vents. Here we come to close the day, crack the codes
light writes for us on history and our eyes. Here we can
watch figures cross a fountain or a courtyard and I will
wonder what it would be like to lean into each other as they
shift from scene to scene—to know that closeness, that warm
silence as the credits roll and the moon shows the trees
their silver. Here—reach me here. Here where vapor rises
from the stove and the spices make a melody far easier
to hold than a note. Here is a note I hope you will hold
here between your lashes, your fingers, your lips, the cloth
and your skin. Here where I have opened my whole self
into words and offered. Here. Please.
Litany: Infinitive
To meet on this blue-sand beach beneath hammock-
branched trees. To taste the glass berries’ tang on our
tongues. To forget the doors and the locks
and alarm clocks. To rest with you in these bowers
under perpetual sunsets. To feel music like a breeze
across our cheeks, To read the air into new colors
and refuse to name them. To leap like fleas
into fields of yellow flowers with purple stems dancing
them under sun showers. To learn flavors like these
rare fruits opening before us. To whisper, to sing
ourselves in and out of phase, to teleport, to flock
to each other like, in a place like this, we’re the most magic thing.
Redefinition: Habit
Habit is our minds giving our bodies
what they really crave: something
they can trust—an external rhythm to match
all the metronomic humming inside. And we
pretend habits don’t take work. But they are
work. The running to buy a fifth or a carton
is work. The locking every window and door,
the Friday night take out, the finishing
a chapter before bed—work. And love is
a habit: the relearning ribs as not a device for keeping
out, but gates for letting in, the savage wanting
to understand someone else’s needs as your own,
to try to taste with their tongue, hear
with their ears and never ask if they want
to do the same. Habit is hard work. Habit is held
down while hard work’s held up, like pretending
shade is good but shadow is bad, like pretending need
is a source of shame. Sweat knows what’s going
on underneath: heat or stress or shame. Habit teaches
the other way—the outside tells the inside
until the inside understands, until it can hold
a rhythm, a melody, until the whole
instrument learns its song.
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Litany: Breathborne
How empty plates pretend at sadness the way
an ocean opens to a sky that opens for a plain
that lifts something beautiful: a tall shoot
of grass, the voice of a child, the last glittering
wisp of a newly forgotten dream. How angled.
How broad light. How the beach gives way not […]
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John A. Nieves has poems forthcoming or recently published in journals such as: Hopkins Review, Iowa Review, American Poetry Review, swamp pink and New Ohio Review. A 2025 Pushcart Prize winner, he also won the Indiana Review Poetry Contest and his first book, Curio, won the Elixir Press Annual Poetry Award Judge’s Prize. He is associate professor of English at Salisbury University and an editor of The Shore Poetry.