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“I confuse instinct for desire—isn’t bite also touch?”
― Postcolonial Love Poem
― Postcolonial Love Poem
“Trust your anger. It is a demand for love.”
― Postcolonial Love Poem
― Postcolonial Love Poem
“We aren't here to eat, we are being eaten.
Come, pretty girl. Let us devour our lives.”
― When My Brother Was an Aztec
Come, pretty girl. Let us devour our lives.”
― When My Brother Was an Aztec
“I am doing my best to not become a museum of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out. I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible.”
― Postcolonial Love Poem
― Postcolonial Love Poem
“To write is to be eaten. To read, to be full.”
― Postcolonial Love Poem
― Postcolonial Love Poem
“There are wild flowers in my desert
which take up to twenty years to bloom.
The seeds sleep like geodes beneath hot feldspar sand
until a flash flood bolts the arroyo, lifting them
in its copper current, opens them with memory—
they remember what their god whispered
into their ribs: Wake up and ache for your life.”
―
which take up to twenty years to bloom.
The seeds sleep like geodes beneath hot feldspar sand
until a flash flood bolts the arroyo, lifting them
in its copper current, opens them with memory—
they remember what their god whispered
into their ribs: Wake up and ache for your life.”
―
“A good window lets the outside participate.”
― Postcolonial Love Poem
― Postcolonial Love Poem
“To read a body is to break that body a little.”
― Postcolonial Love Poem
― Postcolonial Love Poem
“The rain will eventually come, or not. Until then, we touch our bodies like wounds— the war never ended and somehow begins again.”
― Postcolonial Love Poem
― Postcolonial Love Poem
“I, too, follow toward where I am forever returning— Her.”
― Postcolonial Love Poem
― Postcolonial Love Poem
“I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible.”
― Postcolonial Love Poem
― Postcolonial Love Poem
“In Mojave, our words for want and need are the same – because why would you want what you don’t need?”
― Postcolonial Love Poem
― Postcolonial Love Poem
“Ode to the Beloved’s Hips"
Bells are they—shaped on the eighth day—silvered
percussion in the morning—are the morning.
Swing switch sway. Hold the day away a little
longer, a little slower, a little easy. Call to me—
I wanna rock, I-I wanna rock, I-I wanna rock
right now—so to them I come—struck-dumb
chime-blind, tolling with a throat full of Hosanna.
How many hours bowed against this Infinity of Blessed
Trinity? Communion of Pelvis, Sacrum, Femur.
My mouth—terrible angel, ever-lasting novena,
ecstatic devourer.
O, the places I have laid them, knelt and scooped
the amber—fast honey—from their openness—
Ah Muzen Cab’s hidden Temple of Tulúm—licked
smooth the sticky of her hip—heat-thrummed ossa
coxae. Lambent slave to ilium and ischium—I never tire
to shake this wild hive, split with thumb the sweet-
dripped comb—hot hexagonal hole—dark diamond—
to its nectar-dervished queen. Meanad tongue—
come-drunk hum-tranced honey-puller—for her hips,
I am—strummed-song and succubus.
They are the sign: hip. And the cosign: a great book—
the body’s Bible opened up to its Good News Gospel.
Alleluias, Ave Marías, madre mías, ay yay yays,
Ay Dios míos, and hip-hip-hooray.
Cult of Coccyx. Culto de cadera.
Oracle of Orgasm. Rorschach’s riddle:
What do I see? Hips:
Innominate bone. Wish bone. Orpheus bone.
Transubstantiation bone—hips of bread,
wine-whet thighs. Say the word and healed I shall be:
Bone butterfly. Bone wings. Bone Ferris wheel.
Bone basin bone throne bone lamp.
Apparition in the bone grotto—6th mystery—
slick rosary bead—Déme la gracia of a decade
in this garden of carmine flower. Exile me
to the enormous orchard of Alcinous—spiced fruit,
laden-tree—Imparadise me. Because, God,
I am guilty. I am sin-frenzied and full of teeth
for pear upon apple upon fig.
More than all that are your hips.
They are a city. They are Kingdom—
Troy, the hollowed horse, an army of desire—
thirty soldiers in the belly, two in the mouth.
Beloved, your hips are the war.
At night your legs, love, are boulevards
leading me beggared and hungry to your candy
house, your baroque mansion. Even when I am late
and the tables have been cleared,
in the kitchen of your hips, let me eat cake.
O, constellation of pelvic glide—every curve,
a luster, a star. More infinite still, your hips are
kosmic, are universe—galactic carousel of burning
comets and Big Big Bangs. Millennium Falcon,
let me be your Solo. O, hot planet, let me
circumambulate. O, spiral galaxy, I am coming
for your dark matter.
Along las calles de tus muslos I wander—
follow the parade of pulse like a drum line—
descend into your Plaza del Toros—
hands throbbing Miura bulls, dark Isleros.
Your arched hips—ay, mi torera.
Down the long corridor, your wet walls
lead me like a traje de luces—all glitter, glowed.
I am the animal born to rush your rich red
muletas—each breath, each sigh, each groan,
a hooked horn of want. My mouth at your inner
thigh—here I must enter you—mi pobre
Manolete—press and part you like a wound—
make the crowd pounding in the grandstand
of your iliac crest rise up in you and cheer.”
―
Bells are they—shaped on the eighth day—silvered
percussion in the morning—are the morning.
Swing switch sway. Hold the day away a little
longer, a little slower, a little easy. Call to me—
I wanna rock, I-I wanna rock, I-I wanna rock
right now—so to them I come—struck-dumb
chime-blind, tolling with a throat full of Hosanna.
How many hours bowed against this Infinity of Blessed
Trinity? Communion of Pelvis, Sacrum, Femur.
My mouth—terrible angel, ever-lasting novena,
ecstatic devourer.
O, the places I have laid them, knelt and scooped
the amber—fast honey—from their openness—
Ah Muzen Cab’s hidden Temple of Tulúm—licked
smooth the sticky of her hip—heat-thrummed ossa
coxae. Lambent slave to ilium and ischium—I never tire
to shake this wild hive, split with thumb the sweet-
dripped comb—hot hexagonal hole—dark diamond—
to its nectar-dervished queen. Meanad tongue—
come-drunk hum-tranced honey-puller—for her hips,
I am—strummed-song and succubus.
They are the sign: hip. And the cosign: a great book—
the body’s Bible opened up to its Good News Gospel.
Alleluias, Ave Marías, madre mías, ay yay yays,
Ay Dios míos, and hip-hip-hooray.
Cult of Coccyx. Culto de cadera.
Oracle of Orgasm. Rorschach’s riddle:
What do I see? Hips:
Innominate bone. Wish bone. Orpheus bone.
Transubstantiation bone—hips of bread,
wine-whet thighs. Say the word and healed I shall be:
Bone butterfly. Bone wings. Bone Ferris wheel.
Bone basin bone throne bone lamp.
Apparition in the bone grotto—6th mystery—
slick rosary bead—Déme la gracia of a decade
in this garden of carmine flower. Exile me
to the enormous orchard of Alcinous—spiced fruit,
laden-tree—Imparadise me. Because, God,
I am guilty. I am sin-frenzied and full of teeth
for pear upon apple upon fig.
More than all that are your hips.
They are a city. They are Kingdom—
Troy, the hollowed horse, an army of desire—
thirty soldiers in the belly, two in the mouth.
Beloved, your hips are the war.
At night your legs, love, are boulevards
leading me beggared and hungry to your candy
house, your baroque mansion. Even when I am late
and the tables have been cleared,
in the kitchen of your hips, let me eat cake.
O, constellation of pelvic glide—every curve,
a luster, a star. More infinite still, your hips are
kosmic, are universe—galactic carousel of burning
comets and Big Big Bangs. Millennium Falcon,
let me be your Solo. O, hot planet, let me
circumambulate. O, spiral galaxy, I am coming
for your dark matter.
Along las calles de tus muslos I wander—
follow the parade of pulse like a drum line—
descend into your Plaza del Toros—
hands throbbing Miura bulls, dark Isleros.
Your arched hips—ay, mi torera.
Down the long corridor, your wet walls
lead me like a traje de luces—all glitter, glowed.
I am the animal born to rush your rich red
muletas—each breath, each sigh, each groan,
a hooked horn of want. My mouth at your inner
thigh—here I must enter you—mi pobre
Manolete—press and part you like a wound—
make the crowd pounding in the grandstand
of your iliac crest rise up in you and cheer.”
―
“Unsoothable thirst is one type of haunting.”
― Postcolonial Love Poem
― Postcolonial Love Poem
“The water we drink, like the air we breathe, is not a part of our body but is our body. What we do to one- to the body, to the water-we do to the other.
---
Do you think the water will forget what we have done, what we continue to do?”
― Postcolonial Love Poem
---
Do you think the water will forget what we have done, what we continue to do?”
― Postcolonial Love Poem
“Brodsky said, Darkness restores what light cannot repair.”
― Postcolonial Love Poem
― Postcolonial Love Poem
“Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. Let me call it, a garden.”
― Postcolonial Love Poem
― Postcolonial Love Poem
“I am light now, or on the side of light—: light-head, light-trophied. Light-wracked and light-gone. The sweet maize in fluorescence—: an eruption of light, or its feast, from the stalk of my lover’s throat. And I, light-eater, light-loving.”
― Postcolonial Love Poem
― Postcolonial Love Poem
“Worry tastes so dirty when it's spread out like a banquet.”
― When My Brother Was an Aztec
― When My Brother Was an Aztec
“Maybe death is a way to clean the self, of the body,
to finally celebrate it. A celebration should leave a mess.”
― Postcolonial Love Poem
to finally celebrate it. A celebration should leave a mess.”
― Postcolonial Love Poem
“The siren song returns in me,
I sing it across her throat: Am I
what I love? Is this the glittering world
I’ve been begging for?”
― Postcolonial Love Poem
I sing it across her throat: Am I
what I love? Is this the glittering world
I’ve been begging for?”
― Postcolonial Love Poem
“Race implies someone will win,”
― Postcolonial Love Poem
― Postcolonial Love Poem
“John Berger wrote, True translation is not a binary affair between two languages but a triangular affair. The third point of the triangle being what lay behind the words of the original text before it was written. True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal.”
― Postcolonial Love Poem
― Postcolonial Love Poem
“That Which Cannot Be Stilled (excerpt)
All my life I’ve been working,
to get clean—to be clean is to be good, in
America.
To be clean is the grind.
Except my desert is made of sand, my skin
the color of sand. It gets everywhere.
America is the condition—of the blood and of the rivers,
of what we can spill and who we can spill it from.
A dream they call it, what is American.”
― Postcolonial Love Poem
All my life I’ve been working,
to get clean—to be clean is to be good, in
America.
To be clean is the grind.
Except my desert is made of sand, my skin
the color of sand. It gets everywhere.
America is the condition—of the blood and of the rivers,
of what we can spill and who we can spill it from.
A dream they call it, what is American.”
― Postcolonial Love Poem
“American Arithmetic (excerpt)
We are Americans, and we are less than 1 percent
of Americans. We do a better job of dying
by police than we do existing.
---
At the National Museum of the American Indian,
68 percent of the collection is from the United States.
I am doing my best to not become a museum
of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out.
I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible.
But in an American room of one hundred people,
I am Native American—less than one, less than
whole—I am less than myself. Only a fraction
of a body, let’s say, I am only a hand-
and when I slip it beneath the shirt of my lover I disappear completely.”
― Postcolonial Love Poem
We are Americans, and we are less than 1 percent
of Americans. We do a better job of dying
by police than we do existing.
---
At the National Museum of the American Indian,
68 percent of the collection is from the United States.
I am doing my best to not become a museum
of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out.
I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible.
But in an American room of one hundred people,
I am Native American—less than one, less than
whole—I am less than myself. Only a fraction
of a body, let’s say, I am only a hand-
and when I slip it beneath the shirt of my lover I disappear completely.”
― Postcolonial Love Poem
“It is December and we must be brave.”
―
―
“Tonight I am riddled by this thick skull
this white bowling ball zipped in the sad-sack carrying case of my face”
― When My Brother Was an Aztec
this white bowling ball zipped in the sad-sack carrying case of my face”
― When My Brother Was an Aztec
“At 2 a.m. everyone in New York City is empty and asking for someone.”
― Postcolonial Love Poem
― Postcolonial Love Poem
“We are at the gate shaking the gate climbing the gate clanging our cups against the gate. This is no garden. This is my brother and I need a shovel to love him.”
―
―
