Jose Padua: Marquee Moon
This is a poem for all the nobodies who got fucked over by someone with a name and became ghosts, who once held blueberries and radishes and tiny animals in … Continue reading
Jose Padua: In the Someday with the Sound of All the Passing Years
We only have one TV in the house, and last night Julien took a break from whatever he wanted to watch and let Maggie take control of it. What she … Continue reading
Jose Padua: How I Came to the Valley
How is it some people never stop to consider
what they’ve taken away from someone else—
The effect of light and shade on what they see,
noise and silence on what they hear?
Jose Padua: And the Visions Go on Endlessly Like the Passing of These Many Years
At 4:20 on a Thursday in the valley where I live I’m at the optometrist’s office in Winchester helping my eleven year old daughter pick out her first pair of … Continue reading
Jose Padua: Restraint
It takes great effort on my part, walking the colorful, tree-lined streets on these fresh and beautiful new spring days, not to turn to the next person coming my way, … Continue reading
Jose Padua: Sometimes the Blizzard in My Head Makes It Hard to Find My Way Through the Snow
Twenty years ago during a fierce mid-March blizzard in New York City I walked two doors down from my apartment building to the China Wok carryout at the corner of … Continue reading
Jose Padua: On the Persistence of Color as a Way of Seeing the World
Less than fifty years ago it would have been illegal for me to marry the woman I’m married to in the state where I now live. I didn’t know this … Continue reading
Michael Simms: The Very American Poetry of Jose Padua
What are poets for in destitute times? — Hölderlin . Every poem is a subversive act. In an age when our senses are benumbed by competing media screaming for our … Continue reading
Jose Padua: Reflections on a Formation of Birds Seen Above a Parking Lot in Lebanon, Pennsylvania During the Winter Solstice
Though some will tell you otherwise, with reasons ranging from aerodynamic efficiency to a following of a leader in order to make it to a certain destination, there really is … Continue reading
Jose Padua: The Wall and What Surrounds It
I’m thinking that someone else has probably already written a poem about building a wall around Donald Trump’s penis so I’m going to write about the leaves this fall; the … Continue reading
Jose Padua: On the Revolutionary Properties of Sound and Speech
Silence is the edge of everything that makes sound; the slicing tone of the violin is preceded by a pushing back of the border of everything that is not that … Continue reading
Jose Padua: On the Purpose of These Stories and the Effort We Put into Them
If I were the war on drugs would I look upon you with great suspicion when you step on the subway train on your way to work in the morning; … Continue reading
Jose Padua: The Shape of Change to Come
When my five year old son painting with water colors on the scratched-up table in the kitchen of our hundred year old house suddenly takes his brush over to the … Continue reading
Jose Padua: The National Anthem
I am writing this because my world is being made uninhabitable by assholes. I am standing still on a manhole cover that’s about to explode upward as the shoreline moves … Continue reading
