A man in a “The World Is Burning” shirt looked out of his window in his dingy hotel room in what could be described as something between a working-class hood and a middle-class neighborhood. The world was burning. Not literally, but the government was causing chaos, per usual. The post office line was down the block. The art fellowships required blind patriotism. The leaders of large organizations wore messy clown make-up and bizarre shoes.
The man in a “The World Is Burning” shirt threw his Mexican blanket (with a tiger on it) over the windowsill in the budget hotel room. He picked up a bucket of turquoise paint and splashed it onto the blanket over the window. He let it drip like that dude who wrote “Never” in green paint, in Berkeley, when he was an undergrad. He convinced himself he was the Mexican Jackson Pollock. Only undiscovered.
He felt rebellious, edgy, and important. He didn’t want to go down the same reckless path as Pollock, though.
He went back to his desk and consumed coffee. He took a deep breath, then another: just three more years until the next clown-show election, he reminded himself. Just three more years.
Jose Hernandez Diaz
Three Questions for Jose
What inspired your choice of genre and/or form for your work?
I have been working on a series "The Man in a 'The World is Burning' Shirt.” In this series I like to explore the condensed hybrid space: disorientation, the Kafkaesque, the Orwellian, the absurd, the surreal, and more.
What was your creative process?
I don't remember exactly but I usually begin with a verb and a character written in third person. Then, I let the verb such as "jump" initiate the action and/or dilemma of the piece... I rely a lot on spontaneity, surprise, turns, juxtaposition, dream logic, repetition, haunting quality to the writing, cubism, minimalism, abstract expressionism and more.
What is the significance of this piece to you?
Always been a fan of Jackson Pollock. Felt good to write a hybrid ode prose poem in his honor... I liked that I got a shout out to the Bay Area graffiti artist "Never" from when I was in undergrad. Overall, excited about sharing the piece with prose poetry, microfiction and hybrid lit fans.
Jose Hernandez Diaz is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is the author of Bad Mexican, Bad American (Acre Books, 2024), The Parachutist (Sundress, 2025) and Portrait of the Artist as a Brown Man (Red Hen, 2025) among other collections. He has taught at UC Riverside and at the University of Tennessee. He has been published in Oxford Review of Books, Poetry Ireland, The London Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, Los Angeles Review, The Nation, The Madrid Review, The Missouri Review, The Southern Review, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011 and The Best American Poetry Series 2025.
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