Visiting Your Grave

Juan Morales

Your white marble tombstone holds
your name, rank, and wars
in a newer row at
the Pikes Peak National Cemetery.
I speak to you by talking to the stone.
I read your favorite
psalm and then a poem.
Some of my family are
behind me, waiting in the grass

because it’s a hot day in April,
the day after your birthday.
Just before we arrived, I took a wrong turn
and kept driving
east into the plains, where
antelope were trying
to tell me something about you.
Some grazed and others rested, blending in yellow grass

under a blue, cloudless sky.
We agree you would like it here.
Pikes Peak still holds a tough cap of snow,
and I’m thinking of rivers running
high this summer,

hiding behind sunglasses, crying
a personal flood. I promise to visit again soon
with a kiss to the top of the white
rock, like I used to peck
you, my beautiful father, on
your stubbled cheek.

---

Juan J. Morales is the son of an Ecuadorian mother and Puerto Rican father. He is the author of three poetry collections, including The Handyman’s Guide to End Times, winner of the 2019 International Latino Book Award. Recent poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, The Laurel Review, Acentos Review, Breakbeats Vol. 4 LatiNEXT, Dear America, Pank, Verse Daily, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. He is a CantoMundo Fellow, a Macondo Fellow, the Editor/Publisher of Pilgrimage Press, and Professor and Department Chair of English & World Languages at Colorado State University-Pueblo.

Of the two poems in this issue of Collateral, Morales writes, “My father passed away very suddenly in the beginning of February 2019. In an effort to elegize him, I have been writing poems like these that celebrate my father’s life, his 31 years of military service, and the Boriqua wisdom he shared with us. I am also writing to explore how my relationship with him carries on through fail videos, the art of profanity, dreamscapes, and upon speaking with him at his grave in the Pikes Peak National Cemetery.”