Current Issue: Fall/Winter 2010

Dear Empire [These are your maps]  
Oliver de la Paz

Dear Empire,

These are your maps. All the flotsam shines like lights in the desert. And here we’ve buried wires that power your capitals. Here where the river’s silten tongue splits into a fan of tributaries, your gardens. The dams and levees hold back the floods as you had commanded. The water is held down like a lunatic. We call it the lunatic’s plumage.

And here are your barricades. They displace the horizon just as you had asked. Each room you’ve made predictable—the farmlands break across the plains in tiles. The wheat bows to you. It bends.

 

Oliver de la Paz is the author of three collections of poetry, Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby, and most recently, Requiem for the Orchard. His work has appeared in The Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House, and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing at Western Washington University.