Between Us, The Valley
Some inconsistency is necessary
like how the damp rises misty off the mountain
how she will go to the hardware store for a hammer and nails
and break down in between the glue guns and the light bulbs
and the boy will watch her and wonder
if this is how some people pray as they get older
cedars wrap their roots into shared territory
because they can’t help but be connected to other things
their lungs liquefy dark into gold
you know this place, I think, where the light wavers
but eventually delivers
and all children were mountains once
and their parents mined them for stars
but the moon in them protected everything
and we are all one day breaking down in the hardware store
in between the things we need and the things we don’t
we may be praying to different gods
but our reason is the same.
James Diaz is the author of This Someone I Call Stranger (Indolent Books, 2018) and editor (along with Elisabeth Horan & Amy Alexander) of the anthology What Keeps us Here: Songs from The Other Side of Trauma (Anti-Heroin Chic Press, 2019). In 2016 They founded the online literary arts and music journal Anti-Heroin Chic to provide a platform for often unheard voices, including those struggling with addiction, mental illness and prison/confinement. Their work can be found in The Collidescope and Isacoutic*. James resides in upstate New York, in between balanced rocks and horse farms. They have never believed in anything as strongly as they do the power of poetry to help heal a shattered life.
