Juan Pablo Luzuriaga: Cotopaxi Whispers
What proud and honest poems Juan Pablo Luzuriaga shares with us in Cotopaxi Whispers! This
book is a whole world—maybe two whole worlds—overlapping warmly, inviting us in.
Admirably frank and fresh, authentic of spirit, funny and tenderly moving, and not an ounce of
artifice—a voice to celebrate with perfect timing.
—Naomi Shihab Nye, Young People's Poet Laureate Emerita
and author of Grace Notes: Poems About Families
Wrap Me Up in a Plátano Leaf When I Die
No caskets, no flags—my body belongs to the Amazon.
Let me sing burnt street plantain, bolón de verde, patacón,
yell stories of fruit bought at traffic lights,
dogs trying to bite my bike,
climbing volcanoes, breaking piñatas,
burning El Año Viejo doll.
Wrap me up in a plátano leaf
to warm me like Inti, the Sun God,
and remind me about sixteen—
alpaca blankets, tropical hips, teenage flirting in church,
the lanky girl with achiote lips, cacao skin, Amazonian green eyes.
Watching her skirt billow, you’d never guess
she’d become Miss Ecuador.
Wrap me up in a plátano leaf
so I can cheat the laws of time.
I have questions—
conversations for the roots of the plantain tree,
my neurons merging with the root network
of this wise one, deep below.
Wrap me up in a plátano leaf when I die,
so I can finally find the warmth I’ve been searching for.
Juan Pablo Luzuriaga was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and immigrated to the United States at
sixteen. He spent nearly eleven years undocumented while navigating a lengthy U.S.
immigration process before becoming a United States citizen. Luzuriaga studied neuroscience at
Rutgers University and literature at the University of California, Merced. He teaches poetry in
prisons (currently California Men's Colony) through the William James Association and at
Cuesta College on California's Central Coast. He is also a fellow of the South Coast Writing
Project through the National Writing Project. Cotopaxi Whispers won the 2026 Blue Light Book
Award. His work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Acentos Review,
San Diego Poetry Annual, Monterey Poetry Review, Poetry Breakfast, and Cholla Needles. His
poetry has been featured on Public Radio. He lives on California's Central Coast and enjoys
hiking with his sister, María, and his dog, Moksha. He is passionate about fostering a strong
sense of community through his writing, work, art, and local engagement.
Cotopaxi Whispers is available from Bookshop.org
Visit Juan Pablo Luzuriaga online
Lana Hechtman Ayers: A Hole in the Night
Sometimes we need an invitation to come back into the fold of the world.
The poems ofA Hole in the Night bring their own lovable, offbeat solace
and find heaven right here, “where we make
our beds / soft upon the clean earth.”.
—Danusha Laméris, author of Blade by Blade
The Berrying
inspired by Gerald Stern’s “The Dancing”
In all these years, in all these Augusts,
all the wooded trails and concrete sidewalks,
all the sandy paths and ocean’s endless sighs,
never have I inhabited moments more buoyant
than late afternoon, late summer,
the sun brassy as a tuba up in Rockhill, NY,
at my bubbe’s four-room cabin,
hand-built—every shingle, every nail—
by Dad and his brother, my uncle Louie,
when they were strapping young men,
a dwelling that leaned to the left on its foundation
like a rakish fedora,
where my brother and I raced marbles
by simply setting them down in front of the kitchen sink,
and cheering them along as they rolled toward
the sitting area woodstove, catching a little on a rough spot
on the hand-planed pine floors, jiggering this way or that,
best out of three, best out of five;
or outside of the cabin chasing those hens Bubbe raised
for eggs, nameless though I called each one of those snowy
feathered birds Sylvia for no good reason,
trying to feed them peanuts from my palms;
or serenaded by the chirpy music of wood thrush
and toads and crickets roaming the thickets
surrounding the cabin, a hundred-acre property,
untamed as this Queens girl could
never be back in the city, the world at last
looking the other way so I could be myself
happening upon wild blueberries
bigger than those cat’s-eye marbles,
popping them in my mouth—so juicy
they exploded on contact into purple waterfalls
that stained my hands, my T-shirt, my shorts,
my lips, my tongue, dyeing me the color of sweetness,
so that even half a century later I notice a lavender tinge
to the face smiling back at me in the glass,
still roving those long-ago lost lands.
Lana Hechtman Ayers is a former coffee-obsessive whose favorite color is the swirl of van
Gogh’s The Starry Night. She has shepherded over 150 poetry collections into print in her role
as managing editor for three small presses. Sky Over (Fernwood Press, 2026) is her most recent
chapbook; her full-length collection Still Life with Sorrow & Joy was also published this year
by The Poetry Box.. She has poems
appearing in journals such as The London Reader, Peregrine, Anti-Heroin Chic, Bluebird Word, One Art, Quill & Parchment,
and Exterminating Angel Press. She lives in Oregon with her
beloved husband and fur babies on the unceded lands of the Yaqo’n people. On clear, quiet
nights she can hear the Pacific ocean whispering to the moon.
Visit her online at LanaAyers.com
Sign up for Lana's free weekly favorite Poem After Poem Newsletter here: [link]
Buy A Hole in the Night from Bookshop.org.
or Buy from Lana via Paypal or Venmo [@lana-ayers] for a signed copy with free surprise book
(USA purchases only).
C. W. Emerson, The Older American Poet
Website: https://theolderamericanpoet.com/
C.W. Emerson is author of the poetry collections Luminous Body, Glittering Ash (World Enough
Writers, 2026) and Danger Face, winner of Wayfarer Books’ 2024 Homebound Publications
Poetry Prize. He has received numerous international honors, including as winner of two prizes
from Poetry International: the C.P. Cavafy Poetry Prize (2018) and co-winner of the 2023-24
Summer Chapbook competition. Emerson’s poetry and literary criticism have appeared in such
places as Harvard Review, Oxford University Press, Greensboro Review, Tupelo Quarterly and
others. He is the author of a chapbook, Off Coldwater Canyon (The Poetry Box, 2021) and the
prize-winning portfolio, The Thoracic Diaries, forthcoming from Poetry International.
