Small Image for Gerald Stern

Small Image for Gerald Stern Ariel Francisco (bio) Keywords poetry, Ariel Francisco, transportation, travel, architecture, cities, landscape On a Megabus to Pittsburghpulled by a loverto that city stitchedby bridges you love so much.All the iron and steel in the worldcouldn’t weld us together,rivets rusting, beams bending.But I’m babbling.Out the window, descendingthrough the Appalachian dreamscapethat will soon endbut hasn’t yet,the red coal of sunburns and burnsslowly submerginginto the bridge-littered riverresisting being extinguished. [End Page 13] Ariel Francisco ariel francisco is the author of Under Capitalism If Your Head Aches They Just Yank Off Your Head (Flowersong Press), A Sinking Ship Is Still a Ship (Burrow Press) and All My Heroes Are Broke (C&R Press), and the translator of Haitian-Dominican poet Jacques Viau Renaud’s Poet of One Island (Get Fresh Books) and Guatemalan poet Hael Lopez’s Routines/Goodbyes (Spuyten Duyvil). A poet and translator born in the Bronx to Dominican and Guatemalan parents and raised in Miami, his work has been published in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, The New York City Ballet, Latino Book Review, and elsewhere. He is assistant professor of poetry and Hispanic studies at Louisiana State University. Copyright © 2023 The Massachusetts Review, Inc