Jose Hernandez Diaz
I WASN’T LIONEL MESSI
I turned the calendar in my downtown apartment, and it was New Year’s Day. I had somehow forgotten my entire past, childhood included. I didn’t even recall my name. Was it David? I looked like a David with my pious haircut. Was it David de la Cruz? No, it wasn’t. Ronaldo? Leonardo? Leo? Was I Lionel Messi? No, I wasn’t. I was, though, in denial. Perhaps of some accentuated failures. My inability to study law. My languid approach to language. My longing for prima ballerinas and tenured professors in the humanities or poetry, Western philosophy aka the depressive arts. No, I would never be Lionel Messi. I had never scored two goals against France. Try as I did.
JOSE HERNANDEZ DIAZ is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020), Bad Mexican, Bad American (Acre Books, 2024), The Parachutist (Sundress Publications, 2025), and Portrait of the Artist as a Brown Man (Red Hen Press, 2025). He teaches at UC-Riverside, online at Hugo House, the Lighthouse Writers Workshops, and at The Writer’s Center.
ISSUE THIRTEEN features poetry by Luci Arbus-Scandiffio, Rick Barot, Stephanie Burt, Lauren Camp, Laura Cronk, William Virgil Davis, Chelsea Dingman, Erica Ehrenberg, Robert Fernandez, Gabriel Fried, Tracy Fuad, David Gorin, Jennifer Hasegawa, Stefania Heim, Jose Hernandez Diaz, Ish Klein, Wayne Koestenbaum, Christopher Kondrich, Keetje Kuipers, Anna Leahy, Alessandra Lynch, Alicia Mountain, Allan Peterson, Iain Haley Pollock, Adrienne Raphel, Emily Rosko, Lauren Shapiro, Adrienne Su, Cole Swensen, Tom Thompson, Anne Waldman, G.C. Waldrep, and Stella Wong; fiction by Rachel Lyon and Benjamin Niespodziany; nonfiction by Angela Ball and Joanna Luloff; a film essay by Gustavo Pérez Firmat; and Anne Waldman in conversation with Sandra Simonds.