Memories of Diaspora
Jan Wiezorek
Roof
String and small steel balls. When employed
within a created model and suspended upside-
down, they pull all my gravity toward you.
Such are the stressors of life. I wonder how
a dome of my head will react to various
pressures, how angels understand my angles.
Even poetry unfolds within its moments.
We’ve been walking what seems like days
on the roof of Casa Milá, seeing chimneys
from the inside, upside-down, the lengths
we go to bend thought into curves, mosaics,
imagination, and modeled pop bottles chipped
into bathroom tiles. Standing here, within your
columns, I want to believe a fabricated cave
will elevate us into a tower of open windows,
imagining the Seine, but seeing Mediterranean
in you, mustached as faces on chimneys,
reminding me to hold you tight like a furnace.
I crossed the River Tay, passing rock-garden walls
and sloping green so dense in hue that even
sky darkness of hours couldn’t fade your shine.
If poetry has its effect, how will it keep me
awful? Such an odd, old word for respecting
the simplicity of handholding on a roof.
* * *
Someone's Words
I am and you are—all of us here—
colonizers of someone’s words.
Mother’s pickle knife pierced their
poetry on the counter. Decipher
this, detritus, empty w/ adjectives.
Flow co-dependent, syrup of chunky
peach crisp, fused w/ Lake Michigan,
mixed w/ church kitchens, powdered
over w/ sugary sand on jeans, shit-
kickers of beige ephemera. Cook-
spaces, pepper guilt on salesman’s
paperwork. Muscular provocateurs,
urinate in the raw state of uncut
lawns. We trade for remorse,
expecting passersby to take our
contempt. Accept the gig work
as poetry. Eat words to content us
—before our burial before squirrels.
Trigger menus of meditation, spirits:
we wrestle in privacy w/ passionate
wordsmithery that, finally, provides
us those desserts we think to be just.
* * *
Wotai Stone
First names in a town entrench
their rot in sod. Streets to admire
in a name, names we remember
on a street—cemetery of millers,
land speculators, owners of deeds
and distilleries. It was father who
made stones first & polished them
in mystery. I am feeling for Wotai
—woe-tye—how it touches inside
stony mouth, east of peace, salve
southerly, father, western-strong,
map-reading powdered purity up
north, cold, but I am still getting
to know you all, being no native
son. Gulls call for me thru haze
& circle four steepling directions
on a white marker. I hear sound-
pouring vision, touching porous
luster, asking this town to hit
groundwater. When will stone
drink, telling of all the wrongs
it swallowed for us?
A Note on the Author:
Jan Wiezorek writes from Michigan. His debut poetry chapbook, ‘Forests of Woundedness’, is forthcoming from Seven Kitchens Press (2024). Wiezorek’s poetry has appeared, or is forthcoming, in The London Magazine, The Westchester Review, Lucky Jefferson, The Broadkill Review, BlazeVOX, LEON Literary Review, and elsewhere. He taught writing at St. Augustine College, Chicago, and authored the teachers’ ebook Awesome Art Projects That Spark Super Writing (Scholastic, 2011). His feature stories of unsung heroes appeared in the Chicago Tribune. He is contributing writer for PAN-O-PLY Story & Art Michiana. Wiezorek’s poems have been awarded by the Poetry Society of Michigan. He posts at janwiezorek.substack.com.