by Alberto Álvaro Ríos
Alberto Álvaro Ríos is the author of nine books of poetry, three collections of short stories, and a memoir, Capirotada, which received the Latino Literary Hall of Fame Award. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and is the recipient of a Walt Whitman Award, as well as six Pushcart Prizes in both poetry and fiction. His poetry collection The Theater of Night |won the 2007 PEN/ Beyond Margins Award. In addition, The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body was a National Book Award finalist. Ríos is Regents’ Professor at Arizona State University.
Arizona, the Sun, and What
That’s Like
1.
APRIL IN ARIZONA, the orange blossoms
In heat, their scent makes bees of us all.
The corners of the great American Southwest,
The orange and brown bricks, the lazy half-blue
Jacaranda, the red bougainvillea everywhere,
Thorny behemoths of the Great Mexican North,
That blood color, so much on so many white walls,
The smells of creosote, the coyote sounds at night—
This place, everything, gives itself freely to you.
Everything sings its own song, strange and plain.
But a cloudy day—don’t believe it:
There are no cloudy days.
To continue reading this piece, please log in...