1.
    Believing together
    is more than a launch of boats,
    the dew on dandelions,
    the sorrow of worry;
    getting there is more than the drive
    in a car that blazes forward
    on the road's sunset of oil.

        Medals on your chest,
        exact as my fact. Day of
        days: loneliness close to you,
        Captain, debts befriend memories
        always forgotten.

        Your body wakes to your own slavery:
        sharp invisibility of your own punishment...

        Your whole life, Esmeralda, by the sea,
        interpreting the world for better,
        for worse: better perhaps for growing up in the shadow
        of a volcano, and taking up study of how oxygen masks
        drop like holy roses when aircraft cabins suddenly
        lose pressure...

                "There is worse to come," he said. "What this really means

                is that you have stopped living. At any rate,
                you no longer lie so interestingly as before.

                Friends say you are becoming colorless. That you are fading.
                There are some things you do not know or understand.

It looks tough, but what hasn't been?
As long as "A love supreme...
a love supreme" is in my mind, I'll be okay.

Entering the room, eyeing the turnout
of mostly white people, I know what's
going on: it's the usual academic nuts
and their students, who have to be here,
and the locals, whom the schoolboys ignore.

    Here I am where I said I would be:
    surrounded by ghosts of young war
    veterans.  Tattered flags, more desolate
    than flags that survived the worst battles,
    wave goodbye to you.

Why do they admit pale
rain to spill on pentacles,
to inherit the dominion
of burning as though great
dominoes of dark sputtered

Making it is glazing a pot with running stars.

Success in this private congress
is natural as the pomegranate, fallen
heart up, dying in the road; the fence
that blows toward invisibility at dusk,

In our first issue, Maverick Magazine features the poetry of Ramón E. Martínez, who grew up in New Mexico and Arizona. Poems from his full-length collection, The Receipt of Fern Seed have appeared in: A Poetry Mag, American Poetry Review, Balcones, Bilingual Review, Black Warrior Review, Cape Rock, Century, Contact II, Croton Review, Gila Review, Glens Falls Review, Graham House Review, The Greenfield Review, Inlet, Inscape, Panoply, Rio Grande Writer's Newsletter, Riversedge, Víaztlan, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. He is currently seeking a publisher for The Receipt of Fern Seed.

Now she is lost. She was always alone.
Lampshades ask the street for her, quietly.
No directory lists her address or phone.

She would like the way the flowers have blown
around this year. She loved flowers slightly