My thoughtful father

still comes with a piano under his arm
but he does not play
to avoid disturbing my poems.

Sometimes he brings a canvas,
an old brush, vivid memories of red
or blue, but he only draws with his black pen,

sitting far from my desk.  He does not want
the cat he draws from memory
to scratch my last stanza.

As much as my father tries, he fails
to remain quiet, his unplayed sonata
still louder than my words, his cat

still fussing with the brush. I can tell
from his long sighs, they are not friends.
I suspect they met after he died.

Paper Boats

We’d sail paper boats along a sidewalk curb, after a heavy rain, until
they turned again into newspaper pages, moored at the sewer mouth.

Unfulfilled promises turned some of us into resentful sailors,
and the weight of reality made the rest of us inconsolable explorers.

When we folded the coarse paper into vessels a filthy puddle
was still a river, the muck the water dragged an undiscovered continent.

The Bare Bones of a Fairytale

Once upon a time you are born,
and, suddenly, you are a fawn summoned

from your forest, to a far far-away-land
where they speak the language of the hunters

you were spared from.  Your life becomes
about the sound of the breaking of a dry twig,

twitching between being naïve and being alert,
pretending to be calm, but still too afraid

to realize you are a young deer able to speak.

*

Juan Pablo Mobili was born in Buenos Aires, and adopted by New York. His poems appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Hanging Loose Magazine, South Florida Poetry Journal and Louisville Review, among many others in the United States, as well as international publications such as Impspired (UK), Hong Kong Review (Hong Kong, SAR), and The Wild Word (Germany). His work received several nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and his chapbook, “Contraband,” was published in 2022. He’s also a Guest Editor for The Banyan Review, and currently finishing the manuscript for his next book of poems.