By Julián David Bañuelos
What Isn't Found Doesn't Exist With no eyes before, I knew not myself as the poet carving these palabras across midwestern skies, but as the boy both anxious and selfish, desperate for love in the worst ways like all fatherless boys. Everything was darker then. My hair, eyes and tongue bloomed darkness in all directions tearing open any corazón bold enough to shine their light on my shadows. Antes de amarte, I knew not love but I knew everything empty and left deserved to be filled with a love like yours to be shone a bright light where the shadows have no choice but to leave the boy behind.
Sleepy Traveler You come from a different world than my own. From the region of the south where more boats are owned than cars, where artists’ hands are flecked with paints, and where the sky seems in arms reach. You are the gem in my grandmother’s ring a mud-covered pecan, little yellow rose immortalized between the pages of my mother’s Bible. You are the song the birds brought back to my abuelito. Media naranja, my mind has resolved. I am from the place where the winds refuse where the winds take to heart all that whispers where what remains in lungs is dust and heat where each night turns windy then deafening.
Julián David Bañuelos is a Chicano poet and translator from Lubbock, Tx. He is a graduate of The Iowa Writers’ Workshop where he was a Provost Fellow, a Stanley Award Fellow, and a 2022 Fulbright semi-finalist. His work can be read in Wine Cellar Press, Latino Book Review, The Bayou Review, Acentos Review, and Annulet Poetics Journal. He currently lives and teaches in Iowa City.