excerpt

Night Flower

The prickly pears inch closer at dusk.
Or the field shrinks when we look away.
Those stones are pale warts on the hill.
My hand trembles from the cutting.
Sliced peaches form half-moons.
Steam shrieks through its hole.
Moths orbit the lamp.
I pour tea; night blossoms in the cup.

ABOUT THE POET

Robert Okaji has late stage metastatic lung cancer, and lives, for the time being, in Indiana with his wife—poet Stephanie L. Harper— stepson, and cat. His first full-length collection, Our Loveliest Bruises, will be published by 3: A Taos Press in fall 2024 (not posthumously, he hopes), and his poems may be found in Only Poems, Indianapolis Review, Verse Daily, Broadkill Review, Book of Matches, Shō Poetry Journal and at his blog, at www.robertokaji.com.

NOTES

Work in this chapbook previously appeared in A Fire to Light Our Tongues: Texas Writers on Spirituality, [Alternate Route], Green Lion Journal, The Green Light, Mineral Lit Magazine, North Dakota Quarterly, Ristau: A Journal of Being, Tisteblomma, andVox Populi.