by Danilo Marin
Since the fumigators came, I can’t sleep.
I’d grown used to scratching in the walls,
imagined the mice in hordes, toppling over
each other for a chance to excavate.
Evil had a definite face—that comforted me.
Now I wait for a new pest to inhabit my thoughts.
If this intermission is mourning,
who is it for?
*
Surviving dinner guests assemble
as churchgoers this time.
“Why don’t we let the faithful leave first?”
“Father, something’s wrong.”
*
The merino lamb
in Zurbarán’s Agnus Dei,
how commonplace
its suffering. I’ve seen that face
on fellow commuters
coming back from work.
Sometimes I’ve caught it
in the mirror. In Spanish,
one of the two names
for still life is bodegón,
which means a large pantry.
I wonder why I didn’t notice
when he tied my feet.
Danilo Marin is a Nicaraguan American poet from Miami. He was a finalist for the Hopwood Graduate Poetry Award at the University of Michigan, where he received his MFA, and the Miami Book Fair’s 2025 Emerging Writer Fellowship. His work appears in EPOCH and Litmosphere: A Journal of Charlotte Lit.