Daniel Ruiz
Or Else No More Pleasure
After the movie, the pleasant
tone, induced by music, persists,
and the streets seem suddenly safer.
Lovers walk them now, newly
oblivious to the wind their faces
confront, confident having overcome all that plot—
the sudden imposition of distance
divided by divergent methods
of making money, so the shared room
could be split; so the thin slants of daylight
testing the integrity of the blinds,
shaken by the wall’s A/C unit, indicate
continuance—all to return to the room
unrecognizable to one another, the way
trees look at seeds. Split by loneliness
their love expires like bread
in the back of the fridge. And the streets,
walking them home after, seem only
full of names. It makes one wonder
what the value of likeness is
and is like. Exaggeration is for argument
only, which is why music is always
persuasive; which is why, leaving
the theater now, my friend,
we’re the lovers, precisely because
we’re not. Every year there’s a winter
the wind takes no responsibility for,
a landscape chafed by gust, we live
to feel as images do, adjective-worthy,
visible as hundreds of highway trees
in which hundreds of birds are invisible.
We don’t see ourselves as landscapes
but it’s a form worth inhabiting,
even in mind only, even if the birds
singing within us consider us a cage.
Nothing, my friend, makes us
hunger more than our own image
adjective-less; nothing escapes us
quicker than when our mouths are open.
Our ghosts report back to their bodies,
where they feel colossal, and safe.
Only then are they allowed to scream.
Daniel Ruiz reads “Or Else No More Pleasure”
Daniel Ruiz is a Puerto Rican poet and translator. His debut collection of poetry, Reality Checkmate, will be published by Four Way Books in Spring 2025. He is a recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation and the Michener Center for Writers. A two-time finalist for the National Poetry Series, his poems can be found in POETRY, Missouri Review, Bennington Review, Interim, and elsewhere.