The Santa Ana Literary Association will be presenting a new poem by a local poet every week this year. This week’s poem is “Charades” by Joshua Wood.

Charades

I want to be real and accountable
But the slippery laws we must perform
Under so often take shape as inchoate
Mazes containing trained regretful monsters

Like sad circus elephants chained to posts
We know there is intelligence there
See it in their watery imploring eyes
But the looks make us nervous. We move on

And they go crazy in their fouled cages
Charging the bars, rubbing their owns skins raw
Against the enclosures trying to remember
When they first understood this would kill them

Then set out to warn any who wandered in
Of the violent loneliness of this place

Joshua Jennings Wood directs the Creative Writing Conservatory at the Orange County School
of the Arts, the largest such pre-college conservatory in the country. He received the John Fowles Writing Center Award for Fiction and has been a finalist for Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers, The North American Review’s James Hurst Poetry Prize, and the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. Further writing appears in such publications as Volt, DIAGRAM, OccuPoetry, The Berkeley Poetry Review, and Doused the Sun and Snorted the Moon: An Addiction Anthology. Previously, he was an editor for dirtcakes, a journal dedicated to exploring the UN Millennium Goals.