Dandelion

by George Angel

Long before the dandelion
shakes its mane again,
when light dangles and aligns
between the rain–wind-raked
sediment–this place pours
its mouth of gulls, embossing
the air oared by our voices
dulled with tossing.
The loss between us, like a mirror,
reflects our wings.
That is, we feel them bent back
as, pushed through, they hold us.
Plummet bundle, tremble,
what we send tilted, funneled,
fastened cold to low buildings
paling out beyond us,
out, slivers in clouds of light.
We have not returned, scraped,
curled, or greyed this hidden roaring
tight around our falls.

George Angel was born in San Francisco, California in 1964. He is the son of Colombian parents. He lived in and around San Francisco for the first thirty years of his life, and moved in 1995 to Medellin, Colombia, where he lives and works. He has published poems, stories, and essays in numerous U.S. and Canadian magazines. From 1991 to 1993, he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University. In 1996, Fiction Collective 2 published his book of stories, The Fifth Season, as winner of the 1995 Nilon Award. He also publishes poems, stories, and essays in Spanish under the name Mario Angel Quintero. He is a visual artist and the director and playwright of the theater company Parpado Teatro, which has been active in Medellin since 2003.
Back to Issue One: Fall 2008