At the Bottom of the Sea
Alejandro Lucero | Poetry
my dead parents step closer
shaded by the underbelly
of a passing steamship
a dark cloud only I can see
my sadness inside
I dissolve into the storm before me
the road away blocked
by a family of thinning trees
they’ve suffered the wind
their branches rattled free
of their color their reds and yellows
a traffic light that won’t turn green
but this is not the bottom of the sea
this is not my parents approaching
Alejandro Lucero is the author of At the Bottom of the Sea with One Light, winner of the 25th annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize (BOA Editions, 2027), and the chapbook, Sapello Son, which was named the Editors’ Selection for the Frost Place Competition (Bull City Press, 2024). His work appears in Best New Poets 2023 & 2025, The Cincinnati Review, Ecotone, Gulf Coast, The Missouri Review, Poetry Daily, The Southern Review, and other journals and anthologies. He lives in Baltimore and is a senior editor for The Hopkins Review.