In Afternoon Sunlight

The Yellow fuzz-backed bee scuttles across

sidewalk— white cement concrete, and gray

segmented right angle squares fissure-cut

an indelicate topography. It

ambles lost on a sea of cement

without luck of stem, stamen, or pistil

of pollen. News of the world reports a

species on the precipice.

Raymond Louis Acevedo is a Bay Area native Californian poet with a BA in English from UC Berkeley. Being clean and sober 23 years does not overtly influence his poetry, but he’s grateful to the rooms of NA/AA, family and friends instrumental in that turn of his life. He works as a Speech-Language Pathologist in post-acute settings with the geriatric population. He was influenced by Richard Maxwell’s Foothill College Creative Writers’ Conferences during the ’90’s. He enjoyed playing tenor saxophone, cycling and the solitude of running. He feels the world and life at times are a prompt. Experience, images, thought, memory, loss, impulse, heart, all the senses, the surprise or boredom in everyday minutia trigger ensuing language urging him to reply, “I am here.” He contemplates and reflects upon work, family, friendship, aging, mortality, and parenthood with a search for humor, connection and redemption in poetry.