Young Poets

The Disease

Womanhood and all the iron teeth
Of its hairbrush.
Womanhood a disease;
Hot tumors growing under the taut skin and call attention and
Craving pretty sheep coats instead of our own leathery and hair prickled skin
No matter its upright disposition.
Running hands over buttery stomach and wishing the fat could crawl out
On its hands and knees.
Lining insanity with powdered sugar never made it better, just wrapped it up in a digestible manner
to cover its atrocious taste.
Leafing through texts of
America and its jaded wings
What is meant to be moon snails
And dusty lange
Turns to pink ribs and cut feet.

The True Hues of Memory

We are what we can’t forget &
(What I once could not forget was the curdling of egg yolk on
Curled fingers &
The joy of being accepted in the loud, big Spanish family that one summer & the dusty pall under
bridges & blueberry tinted mornings & the cuts on curious fingers
& all the oddities of being a stranger in all this rubble.)

We are what we can’t forget &
Who on earth would have thought that a creature of skin and liver
Just like you
Just like I
Could make the unforgettable so unbearable & take the sweet
Fantasy from fingers to iris

The unforgettable is a dark, dank room
& a hand over the fishbowl’s opening
Leaving the water acidic and a limp body
With a wool-soft underbelly
Floating in its bitter bile.
The unforgettable is that
One body
Was worth not more than a chipped dime and
A plastic smile.

We are what we can’t forget &
Though the curiosity of the sun still
Calls to me
somehow
All I seem to wish for are shadows to make me forget.

Milkshakes Rejuvenate

I once had a creature crawl out of my intestine
And squeeze its snapping jaws out of my navel.
My very own squealing lump of lard
Together we watched the long fog of new day yolk over the
Sea and
The red neck’s yellow apples
Ripen and rot.

Together we watched
The nuns embroider their scripture into each other’s back

Together we drank milkshakes on
America’s bloody concrete
(which we later regurgitated for we both liked the glamour of ribs)
And watched the sky churn a
Vivacious perse bruise.

Together we shriveled like raisins and once old,
We did our laundry together in Chinatown
And reeked of panty hoses and clementines.

We ate perogies for we
No longer cared for the 90s

And once our time came we shrouded ourselves in the
96% Polyester & 4% Spandex Charmeuse of heavens glow.

My intestine creature split me cleanly
Down the middle
And gnawed my tendons until I lay
Across the oak wood flood of our rent stabilized apartment
In ribbons.

the country breaks, but only in one direction

my mother says never leave your chopsticks standing in rice,
says it looks too much like incense for the dead. 

          (i press my hands together & pray anyway— 
            not for the dead, but for the dying, 
            for the ones who never learned the difference.)

                          in a city i’ve never touched, a woman 
               bites her tongue clean off—another language 
          lost to the teeth. the headlines say disputed land, 
    say both sides have suffered, 
   i am made of countries that no longer exist. 
             lines that shift like salt in water. 

   (watch how a map crumbles when you hold it too tight.)

                  a house becomes rubble. (they call it collateral.)
         a name sinks to the ocean floor. (they call it necessary.) 
     (tell me—what do you call a history that doesn’t want you?) 

        the news says the land is disputed, 
             says both sides have suffered, 
        but the bullets are not balanced, the bodies are not even. 

a man walks into a grocery store and does not walk out.
a child grows up with a flag for a shadow.
& the news calls it unrest, unfortunate,
that it is complicated while the ground splits open beneath us.

my mother says to pray with both hands.
but who do you pray to when god has a passport?

             (tell me—where is the country in my blood? where does the exile end?)

i sharpen my name between my teeth,  
          write it in the margins,  
                & wait for the war to find me.