First Mercy
I am holding in my hand
an invisible poem.
I can’t read it.
I don’t know what it says.
I want to make it visible.
Want to see my wife in it.
Want to see her at 22
before our daughter was born,
before I developed
the imagination
to hurt another
human being.
They Open Their Arms
I found out trees are afraid of fire.
How the young ones tremble
at the striking of a match
to light a cigarette.
When no one is looking,
the trees bow their heads
in prayer.
The felled ones eventually
give up on God
and welcome the burning.
About these poems: In writing these poems, I kept rewriting them by hand, on a notebook. Over and over till I felt all the words were indispensable. These are new poems, so it’s possible that you are reading the most recent iteration of what they will become.
Octavio Quintanilla is the 2025 Texas Poet Laureate and the author of the poetry collections, If I Go Missing (Slough Press, 2014), The Book of Wounded Sparrows (Texas Review Press, 2024), which was longlisted for the National Book Award, and Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours, winner of the 2024 Ambroggio Prize of the Academy of American Poets (University of Arizona Press, 2025).
Octavio is the founder and director of the literature & arts festival, VersoFrontera, publisher of Alabrava Press, and former Poet Laureate of San Antonio, TX. His Frontextos (visual poems) have been published and exhibited widely. He teaches Literature and Creative Writing at Our Lady of the Lake University and was recently inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters.