The Museum of Mirrors

A man in a Pink Floyd shirt walked in the rain. It was Wednesday afternoon. Nothing mattered. He jumped onto a bus bench. He recited a few of Shakespeare’s sonnets from memory, out loud, in the rain. Some folks laughed. Others listened intently beneath their umbrellas. When the man in a Pink Floyd shirt finished, he caught a bus to a museum, downtown. It was a museum of mirrors. Everyone was important at the museum of mirrors. Everyone was a Picasso or Van Gogh. He took plenty of photographs or technically mirror selfies at the museum of mirrors. At the end of the night, the man in a Pink Floyd shirt caught a cab home, as the driver played Rachmaninoff beneath the moonlight.

Jose Hernandez Diaz is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020). His work appears in The American Poetry Review, Boulevard, Colorado Review, Georgia Review, Huizache, Iowa Review, The Missouri Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, Witness Magazine, The Yale Review, and in The Best American Nonrequired Reading Anthology 2011. He teaches creative writing online and edits for Frontier Poetry.