Two Poems

Xenophobia

When I die,
my spirit is elsewhere
like a pterodactyl’s soul
so please don’t pour
bleach on my grave,
my immigrant bones
are white enough.

Train wreck

The child was happy, and that is rare nowadays. People don’t want to see a poem about a child spilling a red plastic cup full of Tang on Tennessee soil because he’s too busy extending both arms straight out while daydreaming of flying over the town of Memphis. People want the child’s poem to spill tragic blood like a 32 yr. old mother giving birth alone to quadruplets inside a wooden outhouse with a dirt floor (frozen with ice) and an aluminum roof (about to cave in from the heavy snow) in the dead of winter in Siberia (in the year of our Lord, 1856), as a pack of white wolves (about to famish from hunger) scratch at the front wooden door.

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Steve Castro’s debut poetry collection, Blue Whale Phenomena, is forthcoming from Otis Books | Seismicity Editions, 2019 (Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, California). Birthplace: San José, Costa Rica.