DIEGO BAEZ: Two Poems

hollow phrases

-After Kay Ryan

All my words
are empty, love,
every one alveolate,
resinous the way
a tree’s sap escapes,
sickly-looking down
limbs and ruins.
If I sound arch,
believe my deep-set
and indented dimples,
pitted against speech,
unfilled and vaulted, void.
Mine are words without
matter, empty of excretion
and the horses of my mind’s
green pasture graze there,
in the hollow.

Americanism

She kneels, red bandana and denim
alight in October’s steepled afternoon.

“This is squash,” she says, “We roast
it or boil it and add it to stew.”

She cracks it open on her knee,
breaking the skin and exposing

webs of wet seeds, the sticky black
innards of something Rhode Island’s

only tribe calls Askutasquash:
a green thing eaten raw.

by Diego Baez