Two Days
There was freedom in listening to Sketches of Spain by Miles Davis— late July afternoon, rolling hills and beautiful women, ripples of light over the Mediterranean, the kind of sweat you want to taste.
That was ten years ago and today flurries dust the road in Virginia. Did I get what I hoped for? No. But life is worth it if you don’t ask too many questions, if boxes are stacked neatly in a basement corner,
if you accept sleep as the remedy and resume traveling until you know.
In Praise of the Nameless
after Paul Bowles
If I stay let me write of Casablanca. I plan to go there one day soon.
I will walk toward the hills over and into the lowland region,
then let the sand in the desert burn the bottoms of my feet.
I will wade into the waters (I will dream it if I must) and stand
where the moon kisses the surface— the taste of blood from the mountains,
the first burial of sin, an offering of gravity where life is a victim
of infidelity, just as death is an omen for an everlasting beginning.
Josh Mahler lives and writes in Virginia. His poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Tar River Poetry, Chiron Review, Quarter After Eight, South Dakota Review, The Louisville Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Slipstream, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Potomac Review, The Southern Poetry Anthology, from Texas Review Press, and elsewhere.