The Purring on Russell St.
Another word for house is
Gender. Another word for
Engender is house. An era
Onto which we awaken: it is so
Fully retaining its vivacity,
Only without any of
The additives.
Revitalized to a fault, the
Purring surely ramifies.
But
I have been guilty of faultily
Perceiving in the past.
*
Winter, now. We scatter
The downloads in rows to
Stow. They stopped participating in
The purring, but let’s not
Forget it exists. Or that it has stopped
Being mistaken for
Its hibernal twin,
His tenuous punishment
That of being likened to sleep.
Know only
We have separated
The delicates from the other loads.
Are ready to spend our one more night.
Antidote to the Prior
That idea I had which / You dismissed just so / Happened to land lucky / For you comfortably in / The stream like down / From a goose after / A good old-fashioned / Goose-startle but it’s not / Like this stream is anywhere / Near here and I can go / Retrieve my shit that / Besides is prolly all / Drenched thru but the real / Worst part of losing / My idea thanks / To you is that soon / After a tornado (!) / Tore thru and totaled / My fence by which / I mean my enclosure
David Alejandro Hernandez is an undocumented writer, originally from Guadalajara, Mexico, but mainly from Northern California. He holds degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, and Washington University in St. Louis, where he was appointed the 2018-2019 Senior Fellow in Poetry. Poems appear or will shortly appear in Fence, Oversound, OmniVerse, and the Berkeley Poetry Review, among others.