A Small Story about the Sky

Alberto Ríos

In A Small Story about the Sky, Alberto Ríos, Arizona’s first Poet Laureate, casts an intense desert light on the rich stories unfolding along the Mexico-United States border. In poems peppered with Latin American culture and touches of magic realism, the objects of ordinary life—a shower stall, spilled birdseed, winter lemons—lead to explorations of mortality and of the many possibilities of how lives may yet be lived.

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ISBN: 9781556594793

Format: Paperback

Lemon-Light

In the lemons’ light, in the piebald half-yellow, half-
Green strains of white light fallen to the ground
 
From the sun and through the air, from the sky
Through the tree, through the leaves and the fruit, light
 
Infused as it falls with scent as much as color,
Curious lazy electric confetti,
 
Scent and light so warm they lift back up into the trees
After falling, lifting back up like mist,
 
In this gauze of risen light:
Suddenly we see lemons,
 
Easter eggs in the leaves,
Ripe, rich, muscular lemons, their mouths caught
 
On the thorns of the branches, these delicate perfects
Hung like fish, unbelievable to the eye.
 
Yellow eggs laid by this tree
In its moment, laid and hidden, not for us to see,
 
So that to see is surprise—to us and to the tree both,
Treasure unexpected, abrupt, our eyes wide, wide,
 
But then narrowed. We look around.
Foxes and jackals and coyote humans that we are,
 
Oh, us—
We take the lemons as ours with a dark hard snap, and go.

About the Author

Alberto Ríos, Arizona’s inaugural poet laureate and a recent chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, is the author of twelve collections of poetry, most recently, Not Go Away Is My Name, preceded by A Small Story about the Sky, The Dangerous Shirt, and The Theater of Night, which received the PEN/Beyond Margins Award. Published in the New Yorker, Paris Review, Ploughshares, and other journals, he has also written three short story collections and a memoir, Capirotada, about growing up …

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Reviews

“Rios evokes the mysterious and unexpected forces that dwell inside the familiar.” —Washington Post