John A. Nieves
Every Four Years
John A. Nieves
Every Four
Years
The flowers don’t give a fuck.
—Sarah Brockhaus
The room was easier: all caramel and soft
light. Thinner things made homes in the corners
and believed themselves into shadows and said-things.
Hush weather was what you called it when
the fogbanks slipped between us and the sun-
shine. Hush weather because in it even noon is
quiet. And while the fog is not here now, you
are holding its silence like a blanket around
my shoulders. I hear the geese saying February
out back and turn, thinking loss is tattooed
on the windows, or maybe my sunglass lenses,
or stitched directly onto my eyes. The snow is
breaking on the lawn. Fuck you, crocuses—popping
free to hold up something beautiful only to let it
fall so quickly away. And sun, like fog, can erase
everything. If I squint just right, I can see you out
there now throwing crumbs, feeding what
you could. But the bright won’t let me keep. The sun
is a crocus holding you up for me for the length
of my breath between my teeth then giving you
back to the ground, back to the mute roots
and dry bulbs that never open wide enough
for a memory.
John A. Nieves has poems forthcoming or recently published in journals such as: Alaska Quarterly Review, Iowa Review, American Poetry Review, swamp pink and 32 Poems. A 2025 Pushcart Prize winner, he also won the Indiana Review Poetry Contest and his first book, Curio, won the Elixir Press Annual Poetry Award Judge’s Prize. He is an associate professor of English at Salisbury University and an editor of The Shore Poetry.
Featured in:
Red Rock Review
Issue 56
