A man had a significantly large-sized hole in his heart so he couldn’t sleep. He tried filling the peculiar hole with bushels of hydrangeas, little by little. Still, he couldn’t sleep. Next, the man tried to fill the hole with glue from the local craft store, hoping it would harden, fill. Incorrect. The man stood up from his sofa, and looked into the mirror. He poked his fingers inside the hole and imagined the void as filled. Finally, the man picked up a pile of wrinkled rough drafts off the floor from his poetry exercises in the morning. He carefully filled the hole with the wrinkled papers. One by one. Eventually, he drifted back to bed, hoping he’d fall asleep. His thoughts began to calm down, like when you shut the faucet off after a soak. He fell asleep.

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 taught English and creative writing at the University of California at Riverside and at the University of Tennessee.