The Pyramid of the Magician

An eagle with a serpent in its mouth flew in circles over The Pyramid of the Magician. It screeched and screeched. The sun was setting on the last day of summer. The eagle descended, sitting on the top of the pyramid, and devoured the serpent. It began to rain. The trees smiled and laughed in the distance.

Then the eagle expanded its wings. It displayed two tattoos: a jaguar and a rabbit. The jaguar was named “Last Moon.” The rabbit, “Four Winds.” The eagle elevated, surging onto the city of night. The wind blew. Leaves fell. The moon inevitably rose.

How to Write a Novel

I’ve been riding my bicycle without a helmet
for the past three weeks. There is fog in the streets.

Confidence is key, steady, and remember
to look both ways at red lights, it is essential

that you turn the other way toward the green.
I’ve had one close call thus far. I was approaching

a freeway exit when a Jeep Cherokee
almost California-rolled into me. I avoided it

with the precision of a ballerina’s pirouette.
The other day I had a dream that as I entered

the public library parking lot, an SUV,
I don’t think it was a Jeep Cherokee,

almost backed into me, but I slid away
just in time, as a mime or a man in a mask,

dressed in black, like Jean Paul-Sartre,
ushered me away, as if he were a valet.

Righteous Graffiti

A man in a Pink Floyd shirt pissed on a wall. It was a wall built by a rambling beast. The beast was scared and bigoted. It was afraid of its own shadow. That’s why it built the wall. When the man in a Pink Floyd shirt finished pissing on the wall, he wrote graffiti. He tagged “FALL” on the wall. Then he tagged “HATE”. He threw away the spray can in the dumpster and skated away.






Jose Hernandez Diaz is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020), Bad Mexican, Bad American (Acre Books, 2024), The Parachutist (Sundress Publications, 2025), Portrait of the Artist as a Brown Man (Red Hen Press, 2025) and the forthcoming, The Lighthouse Tattoo (Acre Books, 2026). He has been a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of California at Riverside, and Visiting Writer in Residence at the University of Tennessee.

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