Juan Pablo Mobili

Juan Pablo Mobili was born in Buenos Aires, and adopted by New York. His poems appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, Hanging Loose Press, South Florida Poetry Journal, Louisville Review, Impspired (UK), The Wild Word (Germany), and Otoliths (Australia), among others. His work has received multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. His chapbook, Contraband, was published in 2022, and he’s the Guest Editor for The Banyan Review’s Spring 2023 issue. https://thepoetrybox.com/bookstore/contraband

Zooming with my Doctor

I tell my doctor I am certain I’ve come down
with a bad case of nostalgia, but he believes

that tests will show I suffer from acute melancolía.
That’s why you gained some weight, he says.

He’s convinced my body lacks the enzymes
to dissolve the regrets I write about,

and he urges me to consider cutting down
on the number of poems I scribble.

I’m aghast that my physician thinks the most human
of my ways may be a compulsion, subject to treatment

by word-fasting or the renunciation of my craft,
but I’m polite like my mother instructed,

I nod pretending to appreciate
what my soul warns me will be my death,

the end of my heart keeping my indifference at bay,
and I smiled the way my mother did when

they told her not to “feel so much”
as if a rose would voluntarily

surrender all its petals, convince herself
she’d still be a rose.

Born in a New Republic

I was born next to the edge
of what my parents
wanted to believe,

in a building made
of small apartments
that housed young families,

sandwiched between
houses with swimming pools
and red flowers.

Across the street, a long-
thin-white wall ran
the length of the block,

behind it, one half was littered
with retired, rusting trucks
the other half hid a villa miseria

built from whatever could be found
or “borrowed” by people
who did not always find work.

I grew up along a boundary
between people who owned
second-hand suits claiming

to be middle class,
and people who stared
at zinc ceilings,

growing quiet
when their children
asked for new socks.

No one grew up
unscathed in the midst
of contradictions.

No one ignored
who went to school
with scuffed shoes.

No one forgot
the side of the wall
where they were born.