Poems By James Diaz

James Diaz is the founding editor of the literary arts & music journal Anti-Heroin Chic. heroinchic.weebly.com/ His work has appeared in Cheap Pop Lit, Ditch, HIV Here & Now, Foliate Oak and Epigraph. He struggles with Dissociative Disorder, but after a lifetime of being labelled Bi-Polar he is now living medicine free for over five years. He's slowly starting to be able to feel his own skin again. Instead of three pills a day he writes three poems a day. He lives in upstate New York.


A Nonexistent Place Called Home

The dish you hand painted
signs of the cross
struck by lightning
and left out on the front porch

a heavy rain
traveling
from inside of your bones
and into the bedroom
to do you in

underneath the rattle
there is the music of panic
helicopter love caught in a flame
and dangling over the mirror
of way back when

cross your heart
and hope
that nothing can hurt you
this time around

bend into the curve of the road
and count
how long it takes you
to reach that nonexistent
place called home.



My Name Is...

It was how our bodies
held their own light
told different stories
and never knew
when the voice
might enter
and when it
might leave again

it's how a parent
can you beat you up
inside
until it's the only state
you live in

how lovers handle each other
like dynamite
fuses lit

how the pressure of living
with three different versions
of yourself
looks to others

but they've never held
the taste of thunder
under their tongues
never waited
for morning
so they could scream
the words day light
into the mirror

they haven't been broken
this way, and that
haven't lost their core
too early

the words
for 'my name is...'



Knife Fights & Friendship

I've been filled in by the road
been on the blind side too long
holding my two hands against the fire
as if I could summon old ghosts
between my teeth
with thoughts of home

wisps of southern air
divided into angular shots
against the heart
a stone like that
carries its wound
so deep
you can't touch it
even on a bad night

they're all bad nights
and a thousand & one miles
between the space in your head
and the trap door at the bottom of your shoes

couldn't really tell you
why the good ones suffer

all I know is
every one is a friend
until their not.