John A. Nieves

Tidal Song

I am no one’s mother. How quietly the fox opens
the earth and says only I am cold. How the earth knows
just how to hold the fox in and the cold out. I am no one’s

father. The cracked line of the sky is hiding houses
in a haze that loves everything fuzzy. Until, out of focus,
we could be the same, you and me. But I am no one’s

bed. Comfort comes stumbling across dirty carpets, over
concrete porches and mud-stopped flood gutters. The guitar
in the corner knows the song I want. It is not telling. It is

not insisting my fingers squeak along its coils. I am no
dinner. What bites are left of me are marrowless and burning.
The sweet palm has dropped its fruit. The ants have found

what they were born to and dragged it into the same dark
where children’s fear lives. Down there, it nourishes. Down
there, the bodies roll over one another, a sea that needs no moon.

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John A. Nieves is the author of Curio, winner of the Annual Poetry Award from Elixer Press (2014). His work appears in American Poetry Review, 32 Poems, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. He is associate professor of English at Salisbury University and a poetry editor for The Shore.