O:JA&L Poetry: All forms & styles
Andrés Rodríguez
THREE VOICES
1.
He orates a warning from Medusa Prime,
but his words flame in night’s blind scenes,
not in dreams of counter-girls or animas.
2 a.m. the voice scratches itself on the dark.
I wake into it, knowing it’s not for me
but feeling its dark billows of rage
that glide across the night air again.
2.
Hours later he slow-walks the street,
monologues with banal drama, yet
his words prey on the night, the cold,
the memory of shrieking tunnels, traffic
crushing rain, the orders of disorder.
Then he becomes headshrinking laughter,
an unlit resonance bursting through the wall.
3.
Now he wails just before dawn breaks,
distant yet swift across the neighborhood,
denouncing and defying the coming day
with a solo of “Fuck you” and “Help me,”
one for father, one for mother,
thrown down like a pit between night and day.
About the writer:
Andrés Rodríguez is the author of Night Song (Tia Chucha Press), Portal of Dreams (Woodley Press), and Book of the Heart (Lindisfarne Press). In 2007 he won Poets & Writers’ Maureen Egan Award in Poetry. His MA is in Creative Writing (Stanford) and his PhD in Literature (UC-Santa Cruz).
Image: Midnight in White Chapel (AI-assisted digital image) by O:JA&L staff creative. Proprietary image. 2025.
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