Poem Written on My 28th Birthday
Across the tracks a single withering tulip
the color of fading summer sunlight
rising from rust, head bowed like a tired
hunched old man waiting for the train,
but this is the last stop and he’s on the
wrong side, shivering despite the still air.
In the fading summer sunlight I am waiting
for this train. I am tired, hunched over.
But I am not old. This train will arrive before
the cold, I must believe in this. There
is still time. There is still time. There is still
Ariel Francisco is the author of A Sinking Ship is Still a Ship (Burrow Press, 2020) and All My Heroes Are Broke (C&R Press, 2017). A poet and translator born in the Bronx to Dominican and Guatemalan parents and raised in Miami, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Academy of American Poets, The American Poetry Review, The New Yorker and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn.
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