Three Poems

by Alberto Álvaro Ríos

Arizona, the Sun,
and What That’s Like

1.

April in Arizona, the orange blossoms

In heat, their scent makes bees of us all.

The corners of the great American Southwest,
The orange and brown bricks, the lazy half-blue


Jacaranda, the red bougainvillea everywhere,
Thorny behemoths of the Great Mexican North,


That blood color, so much on so many white walls,
The smells of creosote, the coyote sounds at night—

This place, everything, gives itself freely to you.
Everything sings its own song, strange and plain.

But a cloudy day—don’t believe it:
There are no cloudy days.


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