Poems

POEMS
 
Published in Seeds of Liberation, 2024
 

         If you look for gold and find it easily, it’s poor

No bird this green should be

Two miles out to sea

During whale season.

It landed on the net hanging

On the side of my boat.

There’s no fish there, I said

But it didn’t want fish

A bird like that doesn’t eat fish

Just stones perhaps and maybe

Fruit. A humpback rocked the ship

But I was scared, too scared to pull

It in from the wings. Those things are

So endangered that if it dies and I touched

It then I lose everything. Come here you stupid

Bird, be reasonable. I got kids at home that gotta eat.

We finally put bricks down on the house, it’s not just

A shack, it’s a proper jungle up fisherman’s house. If I get

Caught fishing with whales and drowning macaws I’m done for.

It still wouldn’t come up, but it did make a sound that sounded like

Fuck you, I’m god, I choose what we both have. In the distance two whales

Jumped, and I could see a big wave coming towards us. The jungle looked particularly

Pacific from these dark waters, and the macaw glowed like a green angel against my rusting

Side. We braced for impact, I did touch it, its heart rate slow and abandoned. Are you dying?

I asked it. It flipped its huge wings like an umbrella, wrapping the net around its feet. Good way

to go, friend, and I sat there on the edge of the boat with my hands out on it. The whales mated

all around, in a chorus.

 

Published in Bombay Gin Literary Journal, 2025

         To Space, the Idiot
I fucked a guy who wanted me to write a poem about him:
You don’t just say I love you when I’m inside you because it’s big. It’s huge
And simply not the answer. You don’t remind me
That the moment is perfect because it’s never
The same twice unless you’re asking for a rhyme
Scheme. A metaphor. A break:
You don’t ask someone to break you without a line in mind
Or a hand on your jaw that could have it snap off.
You hate me I said, you hate me! And he knew
He got his poem.

 

Published in Drome Magazine, 2024


          Yolanda
It pays off to sing the words you think. It really does, like living in an apartment where someone is always on the phone, where the voice is soft and feminine, where the cup is always D and the waist 28.

Here I am taught a few elemental properties on immigrating to Spain:

1. Men never take you there on purpose.

October 3rd, 1995 is a nativity scene I understand not much of. My first time at the center- a house in Cali's belly that kicks a mother- and it kicks hard, it kicks like a womb asking to tear open on a cloud. The mother shouts through the patio to the second floor: Yo -big breath here- Lan -the eyes shut closed- Da!

The upstairs window ceases a small smoke line. Moments after a big pale woman shows up at the front door. The mother cries,

The woman gets a taxi. This is your life-

It's hell-

I don't think you'll ever breathe as well as now

The shout here was louder than you'd imagine, birth seemed near inside the yellow cab yet to suppose it'd happen there is foolish considering the mother's reserved nature-

Then a series of arching narratives occur:

My parents move out of sweet Yolly's house,
I grow a voice, Yolly raises a child, my father welcomes his children to the US, Yolly's husband dies, no one waits for her in Madrid so she moves there and I never really get to meet her

Until now when she tells me my own birth story and I can't stomach these old bones

2. Men like phone calls.

Hey baby
I know you play house
This way okay, what do
You want from it

Why don't you grab
My waist, say it, with
Both hands
Grab
And I'll take it, how do
I sound when I moan
In your ear now baby

Does it comfort you
The way my tits sound
Round this way okay,
Let tongues-kiss

Because you like the way
I sound Latina don't you,
Don't you, it's not racist
When you invest on it
This way okay

You like these tits you
Hear, they baffle you
With hip size and my
Lonely 19 years

Don't you wait for me
Forever, don't you know
My neck can sense the
Dog breath coming from
The other line this way

Okay, it pays the bills,
In half an hour I'm
Coming over just
Place your finger on
The goddamn phone
And eat it

3. Men don't know you're lying until the call reaches the operator.

Here we get to all the business stuff. Finances, connections, suits and button downs, all that. No time for egg cooking or house cleaning or those other disparities. Money booms in this house, it grows, the government doesn't sweep in as expected. We adopt some children from our family, we make friends who adopt us. Somehow this is a better life, we buy a house in the homeland, all the cigarettes smoked go unnoticed, there's this consistent silence, this gift. It takes so few people to be this cared for, I think we're all happy, I think and think and it does nothing for anyone but us. At ParqueSur we find bundled tampons, look at ourselves in the mirror and buy those spaghetti tops in the white-woman XL. Certainly we cry when we feel like it.


Beatrice Dubin Rose '33 Award, 1st Place
 
 
          Work Pants
Ah! What a dreary thing it is to sit on the train while everyone else
Stands and towers above you. Crotch-level, all I can think about are those
Work pants with their dry grays and navys and how perpetual this repetition is.
Laying my head on the shoulder of some jean-head half-dead Edward Lopez,
The nylon legs look like cities with their belt roofs and button down skies!
Oh how I don't want to work a full time job then die! I thought, biting the zipper
Of his jacket and holding back tears.
The rows of pants continued to glisten with authority its drone-thread,
Everybody began to look like everybody and I was a tiger with a shoulder
All crossing their streets and counting their bills
Refusing to die above all else and hopelessly alone.
I closed my eyes and bent the zipper with a numb side-tooth,
Dry-lipped, I burned the images of men with their slicked hair and work pants
And grew claws on my elbows because I felt like it and they couldn't own me.
A second after I opened my eyes to the empty car and its sun-ray figure,
A cheerless man in the corner, wild and comforted.
Ed, Ed wake up. We made it to the Rockaways.
 
Labor Arts Prize
 
 
         Ode to Federico Garcia Lorca
Looking out to the Hudson River on 125th,
bumping into my own face exposed to the Harlem
where you say they’ve killed the sky, tree by tree,
dressed in the Madrid coat that sheds the moth dust
of Columbia 1929! Nomad, drifter, come
hold my senseless Uptown hand.

Somehow I know
how it becomes; eyes:
No one dreams these waves
until they have closed.

So, wipe off your dust jacket.
Do you miss something about a summer in Granada
while people take 9th avenue to visit you this way?
Only for a moment, bitter old’ Lorca,
show them the black hair of the subway system,
the thin leg on Amsterdam, the knee bent on Broadway,
how the lips pucker every time the Palisades tremble,
show them the brownstone on your ring finger,
how its windows tense up into the palm
holding the thumb as you gasp for air from
the whirlwind of the riveting curbside.

Why do you hide?
Nobody moved at the market crash,
not towards you,
    at least.
And isn’t a fascist Andalusia terrifying,
doesn’t it know where you live?
Doesn’t it watch the surrealists, the Generation of ‘27,
Doesn’t it pay for your plays to invite you back in?

Misery, turmoil, misery, sleep!
Or is there more than one way that you can be
    put down,
Tomorrow the fashion will look like an elbow
wrapped under the chin, today it looks like
thirteen bullets, like a rifle quick between the teeth,
like a boot pressed against the ear,
like eight men rounding their hands
at the center of their bodies, all pointing at you
as you wait for them to shoot,
listening:
Le chien, le chien, le pédérast chien!

Beware.
The dark noise coming from the Hudson
could wet any pair of wings.
I wish I could be a wall for anyone like you to land on:
The wind coming from the east,
the maniacal New York summer, the calm winter,
every single boat passing by that could’ve taken me
to you, yet they brought you here this time,
while we both dream of the Harlem boy
whose eyes don’t know the sky, whose sun
bends a little left and similarly looks like corn.
 
Published in The Junction
 
 
        Trophy Wife
Look back.
I'm driving the car and you sit on a copper pedestal.
It reeks like coins and
You haven't really ever smelled gold have you--

Look to the left.
We pass by a corner store in the middle of the block
And you draw the neon lights on the foggy windows
And I say they look like hands
And I go for your hand
And you take me back
And let me go,
But you never have left that copper stand have you--

But look.
A wild deer crossing the road of an inner city avenue.
It doesn't make sense to you
And it doesn't remind you of anything
And you’re not scared not even a little bit
And you've only ever read Braille books haven't you--

Hey look.
Come to the front seat.
We'll open the roof and you can count out loud
And I'll pretend it's normal
And I can just be the man driving the car
And dusting your pedestal
And wiping your nose
And loving you sometimes,
But you've never really opened your eyes have you--

Published in The Junction 
 
 
 
        The Roadrunner
I think I knew you once, upon the dust wood and childhood
Desert, I played with you and your worm black eyebrows
Picking at the sun through the cracks of solid-sand mines
Counting the days you and I were going nowhere! Chihuahua,
You said to me one day under the cloisters of dune dry meadow,
That magical place is not that far! Let's leave this tasteless America
I don't want to work construction and there ain't nothing here anyway!
But Mexico was such an ardent place, firing up a border squad, smuggling
Life-drugs and brown boys to motherless labs and noise---
A foot in a boot in Astoria, the Greek women sending their children to water our golden land.
How I wish there was an easier way to have told you,
But there are towers to be built and I sure as hell won't do it!
But I promise you I'll never turn into a cop either, or a coyote,
or one of those paradisebirds we never saw but always wanted to.
You still haven't aged a single day, rounding your weary palms
To the poles of this thirsty New York desert.
 
Published in ​Literary Laguardia
 
 
       How to not smoke weed
I have all these heightening emotions that my mom calls
Line breaks. It's a poetical thing,
A routine between two fingers
That always seem to reek of cum and coffee.
All it took was a night out alone on 21st street
To meet a man who confessed to me he had just raped a woman.
"What kind of woman?" I inquired, wonderfully.
"I don't know. I didn't ask." He responded, loosening me up.
NOT ASK? Then how do you know it was rape at all?!
I have all these heightening emotions that my friends call
Impotency. I was just too high to get an erection.
I opened the door. I sat on my front side. I closed my eyes
And refused to be kissed by anyone that
Hadn't read Wordsworth religiously.
I thought of signing up for the AIDS walk. I thought of gold rings.
I thought of digging a hole into someone's sandals.
I remember never thinking of children in Africa when eating a meal:
It spoils it. Run the beans and suddenly you're home.
And I have all these heightening emotions
For no reason other than to shudder.
My ex always said it was because I didn't sit at river sides enough.
What am I? Virginia Woolf on a flustered night?
Shriek me Orlando! You bastard.

Published in Literary Laguardia 
 
 
         I will screech my mind like the equator
As the movement of the world encases me
Like a bee in a hive in the larger hive that is the sky
I float, like a hummingbird's wing-song fidgeting,
A note is all I am among the clouds.

Yet, tomorrow if not today, the crowds of rosebuds
And orchids and water lilies’ dismay
Will be tortuous. Floods overcoming the furnace.
Thickets watching with their vagueness.

They will watch me while they're aching.
Their pith, their intent, their bareness rings me round.
Effacing! The world amongst me isn't for the bee
Or the larger hive! A box of stings,

An awing never ending.
 
Published in Literary Laguardia 
 
 
           Soliloquy of the middle-southern pink-skinned bastards
"GGM DEAD ON THURSDAY NIGHT DUE TO IRRELEVANCY AT HEART FROM THE AMERICAN WORLD! WHY DON'T THEY TEACH HIM AT SCHOOLS?"

Garcia Marquez is dead. Who am I to stray my thoughts to now when I think of the great living art in my culture? I stand, idle, individual to his book and his nourishment, and run our memories under the lackluster green screen sitting flat on my bed. I am from the south. I remember playing in the sugar fields and sucking on leaves, carefully, watching not to spoil any canes. I would dig holes in the furrow, bury myself in, and lay there with my head turned up covered in thick sand.

Garcia Marquez lived along the coast, and let me tell you, there is nothing more melancholic than being able to say your mother birthed you in saltwater and named you after an angel. In my town, horses were only of use if they could climb mountains, and a man was only a man if he could tame one. Though, I never saw a man wrestle a horse more ardently than I did on a beach in Cartagena. It took me back to the elder days, and no, I'm not talking about La Violencia or PCC. Even further, when a man named Bolivar overtook everything and called it La Liberación.

Men back then really knew what they were talking about, which was nothing. The less they knew the less they could be wrong about, right? The less they knew the more room they had to love their families; I mean, what was happening was just really a favor to everyone. The Indians got to work their fields while the criollos sat around in lounges being almost European. What a perfect show of humanity that all was, to have poverty reduced to such a thing as ineptitude. But then the automobile came along and ruined everything. Everyone seemed to want one, and a child was never going to eat oil anyways. Fuck those cars, there was no longer any control over where the world shifted and if that of the slaves penetrated that of the owners. These salvages! How dare they think they deserve to plant their feet on the cobblestones they laid?! How dare they buy the food their brothers grew?! It was sickening. It was like watching two roosters eat each other through.

I remember 1908 and the industrialization. Oh man, the blacks really got a kick out of this one. Though we were no longer calling them negroes, as they were suddenly dancing and living in two story buildings being able to talk back to us in more languages than we knew. Now the bastards were Mulattoes. I met a woman of Dutch descent who partied with the Chocoans day in and day out, talking about their skin being covered by the pacific sand, the endlessness of its ocean, its vigor. She was raped by a half white man on a beach in Buenaventura. He fucked her for being a "puta criolla," so he could go back home to his raped mother and sing a Chibcha song to the dragon living below the Orinoco.

I have never met a mestizo who didn't want to finish something he did not start, myself and Garcia Marquez included. I have not yet finished resenting myself for being a white of any sort. As a child, I read somewhere that Indians believed the earth was our mother and that we should love her. At the time, the only way I knew to love my mother was to throw her arm over my body as I slept in her bed after a nightmare, so sometimes I would leave the finca alone at night to throw Mother Earth's arm over my cold body and attempt to shudder her. I think she spoke to me once, although it could've just have been the canes wrapping themselves above me, but if she did speak she said "America has got it all." And obviously I've never been too sure of what she meant.

Garcia Marquez, if you're there, will you please gather my stuff and move it from the bedroom to the desk and describe to me the empty room? What is it that you see? Has Colombia changed since it moved to New York City? Was Mexico fair enough to you? Did they detour all the death threats? Did you get out of there alive gloriously descending into Nobel heaven?

Published in Literary Laguardia