by Jose Hernandez Diaz
I found a 19th century golden telescope in the attic of an old house I bought to fix up. The house was located downtown, by the lake. The golden telescope was covered in an old cardboard box with spider webs. Written on the box was the phrase, “The Stars Are Only the Beginning of Our Love.”
I dusted off the telescope and brought it into the yard to look at the sky. To my surprise, I saw a pair of ghosts floating; dancing, really, in the autumn air. The ghosts were dressed in formal ballroom attire, the stars at their back. They appeared to be sipping martinis. I was shocked, so I sat down on the porch for a few minutes. This was going to be a hell of a place to live once I fixed it up, I thought. I would have to make a rooftop patio for the golden telescope, I decided. Everything else was secondary.
Jose Hernandez Diaz is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020). His work appears in The American Poetry Review, Boulevard, Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, The Nation, Poetry, Witness, and in The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He has been a finalist for The Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, The Colorado Poetry Prize, and The National Poetry Series. Currently, he is an educator and Associate Editor at Frontier Poetry in Los Angeles County.
Facebook: @jose.hernandezdiaz.7
Twitter: @JoseHernandezDz
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