Sonnet

A need a change of scenery / With the woodboards
And the matte walls, and their fair / Obvious flaws.
    A thought a lie. Around the corner / The air
    Feels and wants. Reasonable
Enough a say. But be ready: this train is both / A freight
And a standoff. A taunt a something
    Off Main Street / In the Valley
    With its excuse / For an Arts
Center and for a Broadway. Far / Be it
Far. —Dear Mirage: there ain’t / As yet any as such
    Telling of the time, but / As it stands
    It is always / I am I am I am
For me. And / Something tells me
A something a taunt.

Les Liaisons Dangereuses, pts. 2, 4, & 7

Last night I dreamed
and peeled, to the point

of bleeding, my lower
lip with nothing

but my pillow! Some hint
at the parlous fate

hurtling in my direction?
Well, you can sure

as shit be sure I won’t
want it or want to be

in it—unless it invites me.

*

Somewhere roaming,
I pass a shallow trench, and I can’t
help but think it signifies myself.

You know better than most how I am
halfway missing from myself. Keeping

     strangers
     strangers.

*

One aura to every
petal. I find it one
petal for every other.

A rim—a clinking
teaspoon, dipped into
the paltry neutron star
that is this porcelain longing.

David Alejandro Hernandez is an undocumented writer, originally born in Guadalajara, Mexico, and raised in Northern California. He holds a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, and an M.F.A. from Washington University in Saint Louis, where he served as the 2018-2019 Senior Fellow in Poetry. David’s writing recently appears or is forthcoming in Fence, Oversound, On the Seawall, DIALOGIST, Burning House Press, TYPO, and for the 100 Boots Poetry Series with Saint Louis’ Pulitzer Arts Foundation. This fall, he will begin the doctoral program with the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.