Poetry

if this city is still breaking me  
in with its weather and tethered eye

you be the arch in my neck 
the mane growing from it 

I moved into the haunted house
and gutted it to the bones. I wasn’t alone then,

and worked there as a team. 
We evicted squirrels from their vast nutshell nest,

filled dumpsters with fifty years of trash.

It’s true. We’re useless without our vaginas.
How will you rape us? How will we birth daughters
and sons? I understand. We should laugh.
It would be better if we did, Mr. Duterte. 
In India, our leaders say eating chow mein
excites the hormones...

          my heaven innard
turned to land

        apostled lips

to forgive me I masturbate 
then pray to God to forgive me 
I masturbate then hate myself 
after scrolling endlessly through 
porn I never find exactly what it is 
that I’m looking for because there is 
no category for my type of desire

Para Mamita Juana, Papita Pablo, y Padrino Reden

Alma lost an eye when her house collapsed under ash. 
Milo severed his thumb por una bomba. 
Juana married John in Las Vegas.
Ernesto washed dishes in Hollywood until his skin cracked 
while...

Little beast on the metal table, she took
the needle into her forepaw 

and didn’t flinch. The medicinal death
fit itself inside her, ran the blue and red map,

burned up into her lungs and brain
and heart, which slowed,

and she slept until...

Capricorn, hair, bray, and hoof, eater of tin, biter,
bitter, sister, wilder than tame, not quite
gamey as deer, lower cousin to the caribou,
giving rise to tears and the satyr.

in the dream where I run without breasts I am motivated by flight, I haven’t yet begun to unweld the framework, invent new trauma, whip the stitch arching each bosom as victuals dangled, withheld. when I hemorrhage against design it ain’t...

Sometimes I wander around wondering
where my mother is. The family buried
her next to her own mother. Out there,
the hard pines darken early. Anyone
can hide and not be found for years.
Bobby Cherry laid low there. The girls came
in his dreams...