My name is Podrigotumma and when I was a small boy, myself and my friend David used to cycle

a few miles away from the house and find an abandoned house and start to pull apart the

bricks that made up that house.

I don't know how old this particular farmhouse was but it was huge and nobody lived there,

it hadn't been lived in for years.

There was something about me and David working away quietly side by side listening to the

crashes of stones that meant that we had a lovely friendship but actually we rarely spoke

to each other.

Make believe by Jacob Shores our whale.

As children my cousin and I once dug into the side of our mountain, a terrible brown

work.

Good morning we had made the cold walk to the hospital and watched his mother for a long

time.

She was unchained from her machines shrinking into ordinary.

It was our first death and we looked at our small hands but no my cousin insisted, these

are not our hands, they are bare hands and we walked to our mountain, shaped our cave,

one meter, two meters, three.

We bears were making a home, we roared and shook off our human bones until angels howled

like dogs in the valley below.

This poem is from Jacob Shores our whale's book Paraiso which is a book really about grief

but not grief about his auntie, grief about his own mother and it is grief in place particularly

Costa Rica, he's a Costa Rican American poet and Costa Rica is a really powerful character

...