Poems by Alberto Rios

Mr. Teodoro Luna in his later years had taken to kissing
His wife
Not so much with his lips as wi...

Who does a job well, and very well—These are the artists, those curiousLights.

We are cobblers o...

1
It is not simply the Day of the Dead—loud, and parties.More quietly, it is the day of my dead. ...

You are not fifteen, or twelve, or seventeen—You are a hundred wild centuries
And fifteen, bringi...

The morning is clouded and the birds are hunched,More cold than hungry, more numb than loud,
Thi...

Sitting at her table, she serves the sopa de arroz to me instinctively, and I watch her,the absol...

The library is dangerous—Don’t go in. If you do
You know what will happen.It’s like a pet store o...

On the Mexico side in the 1950s and 60s,There were movie houses everywhere
And for the longest ti...

One river gives ...

We live in secret cities
And we travel unmapped roads.

We speak words between us that we recogni...

The mirror is dirty from the detritus of dailiness—I look in the mirror and am freckled.A week ou...

1.I will wait, said wood, and it did.Ten years, a hundred, a thousand, a million—It did not matt...

The border is a line that birds cannot see.The border is a beautiful piece of paper folded carele...

1.Pies have a reputation.And it’s immediate—no talk of potentialRegarding a pie. It’s goodOr it ...

The wine of uncharted days,
Their unsteady stance against the working world,

The intense intoxic...