POEMS
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Published in Seeds of Liberation, 2024
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.
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