Backroom 1, Planchadito (2008)

At the Half-Stove While You Slept, I Prepared a Meal for


Soledad and Tonatiuh and the handball in tow,
And the Redwood, recessed,
Silent at this milky hour where clouds
Confound skylines and schemata;
Rigor, rituals—awake, and the soy fussing
Over a meandering flame,
And I’ve stitched sink water into rustlings, into
Reckonings and eyes and

Jawlines affect temperamental dreamscapes
of island Life, where after fucking, we
lay exposed and new to one another along
crooked, oyster-cased shores
and nascent sands suggesting—accuracy,
irritabilities;

and rousing the fat root I venture, then, at
this sweltering hour of no sun and sparse
words to lure us tepidly into Patchworks and
piss and tufts of chest
hair and the moisture of
Your underarm and that majestic odor between
my thighs when you take me in your mouth
and the scars and The thought that I once
was your beautiful Mescan man—possibilities,
accuracies.

Schematics from a Homeboy Discovery of What It Means to Be Down for a Lorena Street Vato Made Only of HEB Creases and Folds


I want to see drops, though I know how
They menace.

It happens. Like 500 stars happened
to the effervescent hummingbird
That happened to Baby Huitzilopochtli, then, who happened
To the flower-warrior cycle I knew so many wombs ago
as Jefita, and that fateful feather, sly as foxes and absent
fatherhood, duplicating cells beneath the waistband
that happened to the whole belly and body of our moon:
Coyolxauhqui, up in my sky now—slivers
And quartered and, in the heaven of my tripas,
so full.

So, I’ve happened, now. Happened in drops and
Penner tapas, to this pecho of the San Anto
Express News--all classifieds and obituaries for nipples
And a valley of black-grey piel. Can’t put these lips to
your pecho no more. Can’t say why.

Can’t read the narratives or retrospectives foretold
In ballpoint paños and Pelicano cartas and beautiful kites anymore.
Sabrás. Man of creases and thumping. Oh, thumping, guey.
All saliva and synchronicities,
homeboy hecho de mi piel. All mis pesadillas.
Josefa Salinas, Angelita de la Noche.
All my pensamientos.

I’ve opened a month of Spurs statistics and
happened upon your origami-jaguar
cora that’s all HEB sales flyers folded up exquisitely,
tautly, tautly. You’ve chorizotes in tus ojitos. A paquete of
weenes slapped upon the throat. Roma tomatoes and
Hill Country Fair twelve-packs for hands. A brisket and
bucket of yellow potato salad buy-one-get-one-free
combo for a kneecap. I see them.

And all I want is to see drops. Though I know
I’ve happened to you like the palo
Happens to the tripas of a Ninja Turtle piñata;
That shit that happens to us—time and longing and disease.
Aging and swallowing. All folds and cicatrizes.
Simon.