Jose Hernandez Diaz
THE ANNIVERSARY
The anniversary of my death was last Tuesday. I died in a fiery plane crash. I was not a soldier in a heroic war, but an adventurist. I discovered many lands. Most of the lands were imaginary, like a dream. One country I founded was called The Land of Utter Emptiness. It was full of empty wine glasses and cigarette butts. On Sunday I went to the doctor to check on my health. He said I was, in fact, already dead. Furthermore, it was the anniversary of my death just last Tuesday.
JOSE HERNANDEZ DIAZ is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is the author of the chapbook The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020) and the forthcoming full-length collection Bad Mexican, Bad American (Acre Books, 2024). He teaches generative workshops for various writing organizations including The Writer’s Center, Hugo House, Lighthouse Writers Workshops, and The Adirondack Center for Writing.
ISSUE TWELVE features poetry by Samuel Amadon, Rennie Ament, Bruce Beasley, Brittany Cavallaro, Lidija Dimkovska, Denise Duhamel, Alexandria Hall, Rebecca Hazelton, Jose Hernandez Diaz, Kim Hyesoon, Gilad Jaffe, Michael Klein, Peter LaBerge, Nick Lantz, Eugenia Leigh, Robert Wood Lynn, Lisa Olstein, Eric Pankey, Tomaž Šalamun, Elizabeth Scanlon, Nathan Spoon, Sampson Starkweather, Peter Streckfus, Rodrigo Toscano, Stella Wong, and Felicia Zamora; fiction by Marie-Helene Bertino, Emily Neuberger, and Ed Taylor; nonfiction by Kate Colby, Krystal Languell, Kathryn Nuernberger, and J. M. Tyree; a film essay by Zack Finch; and Prageeta Sharma in conversation with Michael Dumanis.