MEDITATIONS IN AN EMERGENCY
after Frank O’Hara and June 24, 2022
It’s a beautiful day to be
terrified, don’t you think?
Everything outside looks more
alive than usual. This morning,
with the bird songs, people with
ovaries call out to their own
kind. They gather bluebells,
poppies, daisies and baby’s breath -
flowers that are equally beautiful in life
and death. Am I the asshole
for hating straight women
who wish that they were gay? Or
a hypocrite who secretly knows
queerness is convenient, too.
From the pendulum of my
desire, honey drips like rays of
sun. My hands are two insects
in the resin of their lusts.
Can we call it a shotgun wedding
if what we’re expecting is an
overruling? Where men make babies,
I make music — deep in the bells of
her body. Every longing takes
its toll. Dear straight women,
the terror will always lie in
acting on what you want —
it never matters what you want.
*An earlier version of this poem appeared, in print, in the American Poetry Review (Vol. 52, No. 5, September/October 2023).
LEXAPRO
I can go weeks, now, without wanting to kill myself. I never expected this would happen. These days, I think about suicide the way I think about updating my resume, or cleaning my bathroom floor. I’m convinced, still, that living is more difficult than meaningful, but the feeling just sits with me as I fold shirts in bed. Then, I do my homework.
It had been so long since I’d heard my serotonin. She sounds like my mother. Quiet as ever, but always humming — singing, under her breath, the lullabies the meds have taught her.
*An earlier version of this poem appeared on the Brown University Hispanic Studies department website on February 18, 2022, as part of a winning entry for the 2021 Borderlands Literary Prize and Latin American & Latinx Diversity.
NATUR MORT
after Amalia Caputo
The night’s gown drags across the sky.
Allow me to compose myself: I’m the inkling of an opera.
Like smoke, an ice queen rises from her throne,
Drunk off the tears she drank from her chalice.
Once, on a date, a man gave you a trumpet of dead flowers,
Certain that your love would be beautiful,
Even in the end. Inside of every loneliness is an hourglass
That can only be cured by seawater.
(The moon’s no comfort without her orchestra.)
In hopes of becoming a star, an artist gambles his teeth.
Out or outside of time, the audience holds their breath —
The silence, velvet-smooth.
COMMON REMEDIES
1.
Breath against blue. Sky, sigh — silence, the soil
From which sound springs. Not a violent
Word, spring. Misleadingly elastic, a promise
Of better days ahead. Nevermind the blossoms,
Shooting through branches. Nevermind the stem, piercing
The dirt. A needle and the softest part of an ear —
Can you hear? Something is always being broken.
2.
Prescribed tablets of despair. That’s not what doctors
Call them. The point is to stomach the sadness.
Welcome to my body — a mid-latitude ritual, a forest
Through which all seasons pass. The pills are not for healing,
Only weathering the storms. The doctors do not wonder
Why they’re getting worse.
3.
A compass sinks to the bottom of a lake, as out of reach
As tomorrow. Downward, our earthly fate.
The surface of misery, smooth as the head of a drum.
Who dares break through? When trees carve wind,
It howls in pain. No one to the rescue.
In one hand is what you know. In the other is what you want.
How terrible to be a creature of habit.
4.
One day, I was a dandelion.
The sun left bruises on the clouds. All grown up,
I ran away from myself. Scattered
As ashes. Maybe it was for the best — to be rocked
In the arms of the air. Far away
From what happened, I listen for my cries in the distance.
SETBACK
December 31
It is not quiet that follows
the storm of my own
making. They are not lost,
the clouds
that fall away
from clouds.
After all these years,
I am sad to be myself.
To be of the earth
and like the earth,
headed nowhere except
in circles.
When the planet winds
up where she started,
it is a cause
for celebration.
I am trying to be so generous
with my despair,
so hopeful.
ODE TO FRIENDSHIP
after Noor Hindi
How many children believe the moon
follows them, down the highway,
like a nocturnal guardian angel?
Face stamped against the glass,
you, too, point to rubble.
It’s Friday night, and Providence
wells up in the horizon
like grief. A skyline
of abandoned buildings:
ruin and possibility. Unlike the moon,
we’re more than collateral damage.
Sure, we collided in Spanish
class, two Latinas with American
shame, but it is not gravity
that holds us together.
Rather than a science,
our orbit is art: full of choices
and mistakes. Like the time I ghosted
you all summer, or, our first kiss.
We are back to where we started:
our cemetery city, which unfurls
from the river like scroll paper.
We danced salsa at the gay
club on Richmond, sipped
lattes at the cafe-bookstore-bar.
We fought in an 1800s mall,
made up, a year later, over ramen.
Returning is like reading aloud lines
of a draft, for hints of where it might go next.
As if our past could tell the future.
But I don’t think it’s that simple:
I choose desire over destiny.
You, over the moon.
SUNSET: SONNET
A pomegranate-colored coin drops in-
to the ocean. I make a fruitless wish.
Meanwhile, hunger swells a-bruise. Soon, stars.
Will freckle the night with echoes of light,
and the people will play a cosmic game
of connect-the-dots. Why not? In Spanish,
we say cielo to mean sky, or heaven,
or both. We look up for what we have lost
here, in the land of dreams hung out to dry.
Half-mast. There are other impossible
distances, blues we’d never imagine
crossing. Instead, we try. And fail. With love.
You are a horizon I cannot reach.
I admire the length I’ve left to walk.
MESS
Butter on bread, your smile. Spread across your cheeks
Like clean sheets over the bed, minutes after my favorite
Meal of the day. (Did I just say that? To make you laugh?)
It’s true. I love the way you move. Beneath my mouth,
A billow. Clothesline laundry in the wind, the yard
We don’t yet have. Enough sex to make you happy.
If desire isn’t dirty, then at least admit we make a mess.
Skin, a surface like any other. So tell me, lover. How to feel
At home in a house that’s not in order? Because when
My body’s song runs dry, its echoes ring all over.
Every spill, an accident. Another blemish on the counter,
That mirror of my filth. But you. Live with hunger
Like it’s meant to happen. Are unafraid of unwashed
Dishes, their fairytale tower in the sink. So. Tell me
A story about delight. I want to know what’s next.
VOW
for the murdered & wounded at Club Q
What I know
is that I’ll die
of complications
of desire
peace a country
I come to
like the one
I come from
at the altar
of shame
I’ll be a pathology
of silk
lavender flame
in my belly
my heart
a clock
wound by want
a countdown
fear
is a lover
whose language
I cannot speak
ancestral
her desire
for me to live
so I do
I do
COURAGE
the Sunshine State
Love me
like luck’s got nothing to do with it.
Like my eyelash on your shirt
is more than just the aftermath of circumstance.
Or if the world, in its quiet,
mysterious ways, hadn’t wished
us together, you would’ve gone out to find me.
Not a crystal or elixir,
not a parched man in search of rain.
Love me like the light
looks for something beautiful
to shine on. Which is, everything.
Which is, love me like you see me
everywhere you go.
Love me like you love the mailman,
the mangoes, the mood swings
overhead. (The tears of joy, as well as rage.)
Love me like I am less than my whole self,
the way you love a limb, a knuckle, a nail.
Love me like you don’t love me at all —
not for who I am. Not for how my hair curls
in the humid, Florida air.
Love me like you choose to love it here,
despite every reason not to.
