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.

        We have the receipt of fern seed, we walk invisible.
                                 --Shakespeare, Henry IV, Pt. 1, II, i

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

                 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.

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,

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

    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.

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.

    Speak softly when you speak of Bessie there.
    Leave her poor soul alone.
    Can't you see the woman's had her last affair?
    Well, I'll tell you, you should have known.

Deeper and deeper into your own distance
you tumble, swinging a dented dipper
into buckets of smoke.  What's the answer?
You don't believe in water, only
in secrets if you can't have one.  So the fire
is transgressing, and you turn around inside it,