There was a steeple, anda light existed.Walls were strong and paintedwith hallways leading nowhere.Men rose and fell.Long hair grew down their backs.Women fed, and women were granted.Roses grew, and roses left thorns.Windows opened and never closed.Damaged spines spit out hallucinations.There were clay bodies everywhere.No one moved.Knees were bent in the circle of rock.They were able to imagine fire.The clay bowl discovered itself,and carnal scenes were emblazoned.A flight of roots became a cough,and they listened.Clay hands built the text.Cracks in the sun and the brick.There are ruins at rest.Dig there because the bodythat opens its hands first willextend the lifelines on its palms.
No One Moved
Ray Gonzalez
Feature Date
- July 30, 2023
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“No One Moved” from SUGGEST PARADISE: by Ray Gonzalez.
Published by University of New Mexico Press in February 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by Ray Gonzalez.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Born and raised in El Paso, Texas, Ray Gonzalez returns to Texas and nearby New Mexico to meditate on love, literature, loss, and la línea in Suggest Paradise. The collection offers readers some of the richest and most complex poems that embody the Southwest and the borderlands, including a poignant look at the massacre at the El Paso Walmart. A unique voice of the Southwest, Gonzalez brings his intellect and his well-honed craft to this work and offers readers a nuanced and powerful perspective on poetry and the Border.
"This is a collection of making and memory—familial, literary, historical."
— Rebecca Morgan Frank, Harriet Books
"In his new book, Ray Gonzalez maps an interior terrain of shamanic wisdom that does not ignore grief. 'My feet,' he says, 'are two owls fleeing the earth.' Gonzalez's Suggest Paradise celebrates a life-map into a deep self, a way into a paradise not simply 'suggested' but lived."
— George Kalamaras, former Poet Laureate of Indiana
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