Rosary
Sleep’s body resting like a Chevy 4×4 slammed into a tree. Yeah, I lived, it says, as a million drunk ballerinas. As an arabesque upside down & backward. A papalote fractured. A windowsill made of broken tibias.
His ziggurat terraced by aggression, stone scored into steps like Isabel’s hipbones. Nothing from him has ever escaped, not so much a microfiche wheeze or lawnmower’s razor-thin snore, not his carnival of women, buck tooth, ferris-wheeled, first kiss, & hiss. Light without radiance, a circle deviant under construction.
Out of respect, birds drip the sky like stale coffee, dissimulate the parking lot where some automobiles stand unshelled. I shut my eyes the way I slam a door—puncture sleep, letting all this air out bored of its solitary room. His face is half-covered by blanket. He doesn’t dream.
Mariachi/El Rey
metal & Spanish. You let me go too easily, the moon whispers to its shadow. A white rabbit jumping through a fence missing a picket, a sigh through his diastema—I can’t stay here anymore.
I can’t.
I can’t.
The misery of history in short refrain. I think of hurting him—throwing a compass toward the vastness of West Texas’ neon pink topography, my knuckles against his cheeks once adolescent with acne. The torrential rain of accordions: Con dinero y sin dinero, yo hago siempre lo que quiero…
Metaphor
The only thing decorating the chapel, a motorcycle. A motorcycle that never went anywhere.
______________________________
Editor’s Translation Notes:
—papalote [a toy kite]
—Con dinero y sin dinero, yo hago siempre lo que quiero…
[With or without money, I do whatever I want…]
Image credit: Abstract image from Pexels
- The Many _______ of Inocencio Rodriguez by Iliana Rocha - September 15, 2020