A man in a TOOL shirt met a woman in a TOOL shirt at a concert. They had the same shirt on, yes, but also the same pair of dark sunglasses. The pieces seemed to fit. The man asked the woman to join him in an impromptu yet sophisticated mosh pit. It began to rain. April was almost over and it was lovely to dance in the mosh pit in the rain.

After the concert the man and woman in the TOOL shirts had In-N-Out on the misty shoreline. They didn’t know each other’s actual names. They referred to each other as “hey, friend.” Minimal, efficient. After they ate, they called it a night.

Eventually, they got married, the couple in TOOL shirts. They had a cake with a guitar, drum set and microphone as frostings. They played “Lateralus” for the wedding song and or mosh pit. The crowd spun around them like a trance. Evening arrived like a witness.

Jose Hernandez Diaz is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020), Bad Mexican, Bad American (Acre Books, 2024), The Parachutist (Sundress Publications, 2025), Portrait of the Artist as a Brown Man (Red Hen Press, 2025), and the forthcoming The Lighthouse Tattoo (Acre Books, 2026). He has been a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of California at Riverside and Visiting Writer in Residence at the University of Tennessee.