Andres Rojas

Bio: Andres Rojas is the author of the chapbook Looking for What Isn’t There (Paper Nautilus Press Debut Series Winner, 2019) and the audio-only chapbook The Season of the Dead (EAT Poems, 2016). His poetry has been featured in the Best New Poets series and has appeared in, among others, AGNI, Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Massachusetts Review, New England Review, and Poetry Northwest.

Using the Scout’s Handbook While Learning English

Not yet a full animal, no longer fully a cub, sunlight green on methrough summer’s high canopy, a streammud-cheeked from last night’s rains:from fifteen years on, I seemyself, lean for my age, light-bonedas a kestrel, fleeing a housing projectnot so much life-preserveras a hurricane’s next island. But today,the tallest I’ve been and growing,I think I’ve come for animals. From their world, minemust seem both comically unstealthyand full of sudden excitements. But Isee, as I still see, both the signs on the mudand the need to read them, their tracksa test for the Handbook. And it serves: a pair of racoons, deer,and, later, what I wanted to be a bearbut was just a dog, the known namesbesides the unknown:muskrat, grouse, skunk. And I don’t yet know, but I’ll rememberthis day, when I asked and was answered, when the world spoke its persistent languageand I, with due care, understood.


Mayport Ospreys

“Wild things are made from human histories.” Helen Macdonald
The last boats brought back the tidein their holds, twilight-ruston fittings resigned to old age. There,the sun’s jaundiced heel. Not yetthe bare-kneecap moon among clouds.
Earlier, the overcast flew its rags and vernal floods aroundthe vestal dunes. Willetstip-toed each wave’s last slow spill,the ocean’s grab sharp as cold talons.
An osprey, prow-like, cutsseaward to the coming gloom, easypast us whom it need not flee nor stalk.What other storms don’t troubleits mind? That it kills? That no wing
shelters it from chance? You’d think it’d covetthe habitual plovers and turnstones,or from a seagreen nimbusambush seagulls. But like the boats
and us, it holds to its tackas a matter of course,and its craving is fish: blindbeyond their element, harried,dead to what shadows lurk above.


Dead People’s Things for Sale

Here lies a fragment of their affection,two olive-bronze chairsacross a shield-round table,a planter in its middle for green shoots.
On it they shared figs from a treebehind their rental, held each like a toad’spale belly sliced to marigoldsor to a knee’s meager pomegranate flesh.
I was there. I remember. The tree is gone. So is their rental, the block plowed flat for a hospital’s garage.The table we kept for a later rending.

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