Break of Day

          How many poets, when asked to name their early influences, will mention Stephen King and Dean Koontz? Not enough, one might say. Aldo Amparán will do so. The young poet, who grew up on both sides of the Texas/Mexico border, says he aims in his work to "give a voice to those characters that society would just push away."

     Amparan has since taken writers like Rimbaud and William S. Burroughs as guiding lights, so his verse does not feature sentient hot rods or time travel -- but hey, give him time. For now we can enjoy his take on an old form: the dawn-lit love lyric known as the aubade.

    Aubade at the City of Change

    In this city
    each door I cross
    in search of your room 

    grows darker
    than the sky, this silver
    dome of morning spread

     across the urban smog.
    Country dark washes the city
    light off the outskirts

     & beyond

    where you sleep in hiding,
    where your face
    wrapped in gauze

    shines like sequin
    in the lingering moon-drizzle.
    I reach for you

    at the corners of the clubs,
    inside motel rooms,

    where rent boys tumble
    perspired bed sheets,
    doubling you, your maleness

    discharged,
    your hipbones sticking
    to my thighs, hard

    stubble of your legs
    scratching. The night I followed
    a strange road, looking

    to forget all this, starlight
    spooled the gravel ribbon
    leading back to the city

    behind me, back
    to the hospital room
    where I last saw you—

    Tonight, I’ll rest
    on this road, I’ll look back
    to the city of change

    where one year
    two skyscrapers lifted, a park
    shed trees

    for new thoroughfares,
    & an old cinema
    erupted to rebuild itself

    in its place. I’ll stay
    on the pavement,
    suspended in time

    like the broken sign announcing
    You are entering ______, (a name

    changed two years ago),
    & I’ll wonder
    if the hot breeze

    blowing the nape
    of my neck
    is your unchanged

    breath rising like candle
    smoke from the city.