MEDITATIONS IN AN EMERGENCY
after Frank O’Hara and June 24, 2022
It’s a beautiful day to be
terrified, don’t you think?
Everything outside looks more
alive than usual. This morning,
with the bird songs, people with
ovaries call out to their own
kind. They gather bluebells,
poppies, daisies and baby’s breath -
flowers that are equally beautiful in life
and death. Am I the asshole
for hating straight women
who wish that they were gay? Or
a hypocrite who secretly knows
queerness is convenient, too.
From the pendulum of my
desire, honey drips like rays of
sun. My hands are two insects
in the resin of their lusts.
Can we call it a shotgun wedding
if what we’re expecting is an
overruling? Where men make babies,
I make music — deep in the bells of
her body. Every longing takes
its toll. Dear straight women,
the terror will always lie in
acting on what you want —
it never matters what you want.
*An earlier version of this poem appeared, in print, in the American Poetry Review (Vol. 52, No. 5, September/October 2023).
LEXAPRO
I can go weeks, now, without wanting to kill myself. I never expected this would happen. These days, I think about suicide the way I think about updating my resume, or cleaning my bathroom floor. I’m convinced, still, that living is more difficult than meaningful, but the feeling just sits with me as I fold shirts in bed. Then, I do my homework.
It had been so long since I’d heard my serotonin. She sounds like my mother. Quiet as ever, but always humming — singing, under her breath, the lullabies the meds have taught her.
*An earlier version of this poem appeared on the Brown University Hispanic Studies department website on February 18, 2022, as part of a winning entry for the 2021 Borderlands Literary Prize and Latin American & Latinx Diversity.
NATUR MORT
after Amalia Caputo
The night’s gown drags across the sky.
Allow me to compose myself: I’m the inkling of an opera.
Like smoke, an ice queen rises from her throne,
Drunk off the tears she drank from her chalice.
Once, on a date, a man gave you a trumpet of dead flowers,
Certain that your love would be beautiful,
Even in the end. Inside of every loneliness is an hourglass
That can only be cured by seawater.
(The moon’s no comfort without her orchestra.)
In hopes of becoming a star, an artist gambles his teeth.
Out or outside of time, the audience holds their breath —
The silence, velvet-smooth.
