AFTER THE TEMPEST
As if to give up counting the slew of brown bodies
floating with their eyes wielded to the sky—because
we have trained in at least one position when dying,
though we disguise inheriting any knowledge of such
travesties—the guava trees abandon their bridal veils
in the branches of those who firmly believe dwelling
is carried under the skin, not in the limbs of what can flee.
And for a moment, his face crosses her face, their hands
fractured by the planks—or you can say recovery springs
from slaughter. Time in exodus: the bone-horticulture
under the swirling cloak of death…
—How is this not
about the dissolution of friendship, the migratory birds
passing through the neo-necropolis? If we are mostly
displaced water—staggered, vigilant—when we drown
we are asking the flood tides to be gentler as we pray
away insufficiency. We, too, will drink to vanity. If only
I could trill in the range of loss without forgetting the angst
in my body—where the clouds coalesce around the ditch
to rename it rain. While the dried blood, they call desire.
MARROW
Then a wealthy Israeli student with a modeling career
and a military history invites us broke émigrés
to his apartment for drinks, our black shirts unbuttoned
in thirty-degree weather, with a strange fatigue
from dancing to M.I.A.’s galang a lang a lang lang
our bodies piled on the dorm room couch like raccoons
from an outtake of Fellini’s Satyricon, minus the garlands,
minus the sugar daddies, minus the staged processions,
except processions are my forte, because I’m called
out for dressing like an aimless widow every summer,
deplumed messiah, and when another guest, the underage
daughter of a conservative politician from California
turns to me and says she can’t find me attractive because
I’m Latino, what of the clinical light in the kitchen, what
of the lazy glow of the sci-fi helmeted lamps in the living
room, cartoonish but instinctively Ma nuit chez Maud,
the mariner’s despair, how silence is the outside world
wanting to barge back in and claim the dispossessed body,
the body tousled on the stained carpet, to then taking
courses on Milton’s divorce treatises, on binaries, on anti-
poetry, on mea culpas, postmodern Hail Marys, and how
I’d been told that following the Fall we grew proficient
at finding each other naked everywhere, in the nascent
bones of a fawn, in the wilderness of my brown skin,
in the voice boxes of tree trunks, because I’m always leaving
countries behind or maybe I can’t get rid of my For Rent
signs decisively, and how the Fall is maybe symbolic
for how deep we’ll burrow within us to still blame ourselves
for holding the map of rejection, that map with subjugated
creases, see Fig. 1 for assemblage, see Fig 2. for the leper
who cries for clemency in the metaphor, where I worry
for the bones of the misfits who roam in the sewage system
beneath the tombs of my future fathers, their perilous dicks,
the Tacomas, the Kodachromes, the paintbrushes,
because it takes a mind of calcification to receive the grace
of that radiant refugee in the sky that’s always intended
to touch us Here is my heavenly handle Here are my salt-
wounded arms for what decides to live outside of absence
but the thing that dreams of intangible rooms, and my savior,
how he’ll sit at the table, promising more than the allegory.
MARROW
The two-hearted spirit-spider generates blood
portraitures out of lies
which in due course
mutate into forked
tongues in my mouth—those daggers
I’m too hesitant to brandish.
Poets often speak
of the residual pain
left behind when language has been fractured—
but how little we understand
where to mend the cartilage,
re-stitch our ghosts.
Sarah: you are the mutant
mutants are too ashamed to mention.
La Maricona. La Pata. La Bullet-Riddled
Puta—bystander of mauled angels,
one of those bastard superheroes
who owe the earth / nothing.
Your social worker writes down:
She demonstrates exemplary
movement of the Aristotelian
model: exposure,
rising shame, crown of thorns, bastardization—
the metaphysical resolution.
I fell in love with a man once
who was forced as a child to swallow his own
vomit when he couldn’t eat anymore. The failure
of line breaks when some cuts won’t bleed.
Every evening,
after sex, I could hear
the whirring of the blender:
bone bone bone
prayer prayer
Nothing has boundaries
in the ways I’m willing
to worship. Who cares for baptism
when the body
is excess holiness waiting to combust.
Roy G. Guzmán is a Honduran writer, raised in Miami, and a current MFA student in poetry at the University of Minnesota. His work has appeared or will appear in The Adroit Journal, Word Riot, Reservoir, Connotation Press, and Notre Dame Review. Roy is the poetry editor for Sundog Lit, and the recipient of a Pushcart prize nomination and a Gesell Award honorable mention in fiction. In February, he attended the fourth Letras Latinas Writers Initiative gathering, sponsored by Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies, in partnership with the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing and the MFA Program at Arizona State University. Roy will serve this summer as the Scribe for Human Rights at the University of Minnesota, focusing on issues that affect migrant farm workers.