Sphinx
If you
mean freedom
like you hold
police departments
accountable,
offer water or meal
no more illegal where you find border
or animals along the road
who never make it home
no longer warming their dens with us on the earth
but backwards and in half
not free in the old, but here with us in the ancient,
red fur pulses in the cars’ winds only
psychically here with us in the writing they want you
to read inside them as if they were natural,
as if we were all still heading home.
Commonwealth
The news channel told me
what a massacre it’s been
there are no words they can say for it still. As petals fall this voice:
No victory, no defeat of an enemy is worth killing their children.
sorrow but it’s from a different network, you never caught me shoplifting.
I pencil a bird over an uncreated oasis, and you, you’re all face and limbs,
what’s bombed? but it’s in low-fi pix,
who doesn’t want the information of these times? I was loved by you
when I spoke grammatically, as I lived our empty fantasies.
Cortez, 2022
Wyatt Welch grew up on the Interstates after being kidnapped by their father, a troubled veteran of the Vietnam War. A Floridian and long-time Tucsonan, questioning the boundaries of Self and the State has been the work of their recent poetry, alongside other poetic concerns such as living gay/transgender in the United States.