FLORICANTO ISSUE Joseph Ross   IF YOU LEAVE YOUR SHOES If you leave your shoes on the front porch when you run to the city pool for swimming lessons, you might end up walking across the sand of the desert in scorched feet, bare, like the prophets, who knew what it was to burn. If you leave your lover to run to the market for bread and pears you might return to find your lover gone and the bed covered with knives, hot and gleaming from a morning in the sun. If you leave your country in the wrong hands, you might return to see it drowning in blood, able to spit but not to speak.   Joseph Ross is the author of Meeting Bone Man, forthcoming from Main Street Rag Press in Spring 2012. Individual poems of his appear in Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion & Spirituality, Poetic Voices Without Borders 1 and 2, Tidal Basin Review, Sojourners and Poet Lore, who nominated him for a Pushcart Prize. In 2007, he co-edited Cut Loose the Body: An Anthology of Poems on Torture and Fernando Botero’s Abu Ghraib. He has taught writing at the University of Notre Dame, American University, and currently directs the Writing Center at Carroll High School in DC. His website: www.JosephRoss.net.   Published in Volume 13, Number 1, Winter 2012. To read more by this author: Joseph Ross: Evolving City Issue Joseph Ross: Langston Hughes Tribute Issue