the urban renaissance

SYMMETRY
by Derek Beres

I.

I hold the world on my fingertips
And massage its heart with words.

(How hard they are to win,
How easy to break)

I hold the world to my lips
And taste its anxious honey,

The slow, melodic nectar dancing
Through my lungs into my nourished belly.

I hold the world on my fingertips
As I hold your name on my tongue;

This world, mine to own,
But your sighs are roses I cannot hold.

The world for your sighs,
My kingdom for a journey into your jasmine eyes
Under feathers burning with candles in my room;

The world for your eyes,
My poems for a journey into your jasmine thighs,
Lips and wine undress flesh as roses in autumn bloom.

I hold an orchestra on my single piano,
Each note fragile, echoes your name;

I hold a grain of sand on my fingertip
And watch it dissolve into rain.

II.

At night
Whence you curl legs under warm quilts
And wrap arms around marble pillows,

I light vanilla candles,
Listen to their flames in silence,
And watch them gently fade away....

THE HANDS OF MY FATHER
By Vincent Toro

The hands of my father speak in cryptic gesture,
Of work, abandonment, enduring.

There are screwdrivers, microchips stuck beneath the fingernails on
The hands of my father,
Splinters in the heel left behind as casualties from mechanical lives
he has
saved.

Garage pit grease is a toddler clinging to the lines on the palms of
The hands of my father,
Preserving the meticulous smell of cynicism soldered with sweat.

They are coarse and bruised, cracked, dried up, abused,
Cloaking fragile dreams of tropical cybernetic landscapes and World
Series
Rings
Which linger underneath each callous that inhabits his thumb and
forefinger.

The hard epidermis coating the stone-like tentacles is filthy and
inflexible,
The knuckles stubborn glaciers entrenched in warmth
That exists miles beneath their impenetrable surface.

The hands of my father are clenched in mute loyalty
As they refuse to ask centuries too late for a much needed rest.
They are a bull’s horns held high in blue-collar pride,
Each finger a flag honoring islands built on labor and love.

Torn ligaments which carry the feast home to wife and child,
Palms burnt from pulling baby chicks led astray out of the fire,
Thumbs sliced on the rigid edges of life begat on Harlem curbsides,

The wrists that maintain them arthritic from holding up a body
Which has grown without the hands of his father to guide them,
The hands of my father are an unwritten history book narrating the
gallant
survival of common
heroes.

The hands of my father weep for the man that cannot.
They apologize, with fresh Tune-Ups, fixed light switches,
Mysteriously updated software programs,
For the man that curls them into fists in pronouncement of bitter
curses to
the atmosphere.

They are big as country Redwoods,
Enormous Teddy Bear claws that growl in futile attempts to create
illusions
of toughness,
Gargantuan pillows that break the falls of precocious cubs
Who refuse to believe that bears cannot fly,
Big, big as mountains, as big as anything in the world

Aside from his own heart.

The hands of my father emulate the adorably brutish motions of
The distant shadow that is the hands of his father;
Firm, mangled, Puerto Rican hands eternally building, cooking the
feast,
Which speak, in distant cryptic gesture,

Of work, abandonment, enduring.