Jordan Escobar
Goat City, USA
Seize me. Take me as dust
beneath your fingers,
the remnant left over after stenciling
the name of this place
into the grime of a truck window.
This knowledge we are left with:
the way to call a field home.
Coated with dirt, with pollen,
with crumpled olive blossoms
filling a truck bed. Each one
a different desire left unspoken
to the gray sky. Claim this. All of it.
The world tilting side to side,
the risen animals, welcoming
this day, welcoming the next.
Jordan Escobar reads “Goat City, USA”
Jordan Escobar is a writer from Bakersfield, California. He is the author of the chapbook Men With the Throats of Birds (CutBank Books). He is a 2023 winner of the St. Botolph Emerging Artist Award and a 2022 Gregory Djanikian Scholar in Poetry. He has been published in many journals including Prairie Schooner, Zone 3, the Common and elsewhere. He currently teaches at Emerson College and Babson College.