the wheat and coal and gold that whiff of power
and I was vapor like a smog that becomes a wraith
over the city then back to animal form decompressed
and atomized into a past life as star and I was that animal
truth the spirit I had dreamt about being more cloud
and star than given I was just the density of water
a cycle in and out the fade of my fugitive
substance going south and the yearn for decadence
disappears in the annals yet leaves a taste in the mouth
metallic and lime the sense of dissolution and I was speed
and avowal to reset the orb of gravity I was risen from foam
necessitated by colony sired in violence exported as luxury
•
the animal imagines what life is in her fiefdom
what the edges of her domain are
what parables become policy
vice-versa the animal susses out confederate
from the horde the animal defines the age’s pathology
how will the animal cure it
how does the animal describe its worry
and recognizing it how does the animal
solve the animal outside of time
does the animal become an immunity
or serve the fiefdom what is the give
and the takeaway is it false hope
inescapable class the fortune a fortress
we all grew up frozen to a tier
are we up or down or over
•
in the legion of animals
the serpent is the queen
and the elephant the serf
the microbe is the god and
the human animal is that
god’s host the factory is
apex maw the folklore its
enforcer father is both lord
and rod and mother is
dollar-dollar bills
molten core of the real
•
I hardly care that I’m doing
harpy that I’m a city’s pestilence
should I mother or write
serve art or the state
•
am I the monkey on the crocodile’s back
or just a brown-winged dove and can
you modify art to suit my ample otherness
I know we’re friends though I’m that friend
you tally on your list of goodwill for domesticating
my otherness but why is your gesture phoned-in
or scared to offend the august king who pretends
at false hope while denser evils dock in gated
communities built on imported bootstraps since
they can’t repel our work corpses so how do we meet
halfway when the toll is steep and so is the road
•
I became American each time
my parents became American
each instance symbolizing a different
version of being American
first is when they decided to stay
and next is the photo of my parents beaming
by a judge with citizenship in their hand
also the photo of my mother and father
in the ’60s looking like any American
perhaps foreign only in tongue
the Statue of Liberty behind them
or the first time they’re registered
as American by having an American
job though I was born in America
I wasn’t born American
I know it’s hard to understand
but it’s also not hard I became American
when I memorized the national anthem
or when I had sex with a white boy
or when I thought my first
racist thought or when I decided
I wanted to always live in a place like US
which is how America becomes
an event that happens only for the lucky
so the question where are you from means I was born
foreign in America but not their America
I mean the chain of land called America connected
by chains of mountains where minute threads of
the first people who lived that America live in me
when there was the earth giving only over
what she wanted that was before she became American
•
how long I yearned
for a slice of the monolith’s
throbbing global power
over all of me as well as
the you the thee the thou
the them and the us
in a tangle of want since
winter was coming he was
a giant wriggling worm
circling the earth leeching
human ore in the name
of God dressed as The Rock
encased in Mizrahi
for Target and straddling
the Golden Gate Bridge
in a ’roid rage battling the alien
brown bodies brown
murdered bodies and drowned
bodies brown repelled bodies
uncounted brown bodies
on borders in boats from hurricanes
in holds and shipping
containers against walls the new word
for global encroachment
and now winter
•
can I trust your simpatico or will my dark repel
will you be frontier and border kiss me for the camera
can I have authentic depth and will you align with me
will you hold my curls when I’m expelling phantoms
who open tunnels into the past will you consider the sky
contra the west with its grinding machines will you Spartacus
with me will you jump in and fight can it be your caravan too
record my face lover record my limbs record them for
us all I’m lucky I’m lucky I’m so lucky that I’m lucky
•
who leads this tango
the thief or the judge
the huckster or the king
can I trust the ardor
or is it just theater
will I be claimant or
defendant fool or shaman
animal or asset
plough or oxen
are we going to get
ahistorical because of
the inconvenience of the thing
disguised as the thing
that sounds like shrimperial
and rhymes with shrivilege
and is tinged with shrisease
I could just leave the grid
for exile but what island would
I become and how would
I still make interventions
into culture where might
I find the suitable therefore
inferior slot for me
could I live there for good
if I pay my taxes and how civil
would I have to perform
like arboretum or like
public statue of a settler
or like skate park or
recreation center
how would you evaluate
how I was or was not what you
hoped true and erotically
where should I plant
the old self because she’s loose
and hot and deranged
riled and ill-tempered
can she be denatured
can she be defanged
can she be fauna
of the seventh dimension
how do I suppress my cynicism
when you tangle my money
with blood devour my glimmer
co-opt and whitewash
how do I build a home on sand
which map do I use
do I adapt to code to form
to tradition and where do I belong
<
br /> shall I ask permission
do I beg for a license
that warrants my claim
•
why are we wedged so much horchata
mulatta corbata pirata and obvi piñata
metiste la pata cuando abriste la boca
pero te lo digo with love
•
am I the mariner
and whose bird was it
and how does absolution
work and are counter-
histories in your allusions
and am I your audience or
am I actually the one who louses
up the place a sign of the raptures
to come am I the false flag operation
of crisis actors in a San Mateo
high school down the way
from a #secession billboard
will I be reincarnated as elephant
as king as flea as barnacle
why am I the locus of your discontent
and not your president
your intimate the landlord
an aesthetic overlord
how do I hang from your neck
with such ease and when
will I be graced with immunity
•
the animal infiltrates the maze outside
the wall a whimper a moan the mewl
of the lamb bears the yoke of Assimilation
while our sweatshirts bear the logos of Ambition
the animal burrows under the monolith’s base
the animal intercepts or plunders which is why
walls go deep into hell and out and up and down
until our throats are dusty with the grit
from the walls once I knew a man who thought
to prevent birds’ migration the wall
should reach into the sky restrict the satellites
make the wall that reaches into space
constructed by the former middle
class who will learn how to make walls
from the wall-making app the government
mails them after The Great Obsolescence
that’ll happen you know one day you’re supreme
animal in the rainbow the next you’re a mob’s cog
patrolling a border and the next you’re stacking bricks
imprinted with the Amazon flag just like your beloved
media-construct wanted for you and your
helpmates such pretty girls such soft hands
•
I’d once have left
brown behind
having already
left the tribe behind
and her tongue
and the garb that made me
theirs behind because it felt
like leaving hoi polloi behind
to finally put behind the chola
in my mother’s tongue
lingering in quiet deep vowels
behind meant I could leave
behind inferiority complex
not really but in theory
I tried to leave my eden-dreams
behind but they stuck to my shoe
because of my anarchic spirit
I leave behind dignity
so the angel inside me
stays behind me too
along with my poison pen
never mind I’ll need that
anger was my primary breathing
apparatus for so long
what a mixed blessing when it worked
I’ve learned the most from the cracked
once I broke into pieces
now I break into wholes
•
the hasty deportation wave of 2025
came via the dour pilgrim’s burlap sack
he launched us into the river
on the edge of so-called civilization
and there was such a taste of afterlife
to the spell of fireworks
on that enchanting independence day
•
how much credit do I claim and where do I claim it like at the office of art claims or
the office of welfare and how did I earn contempt was it my cheeky or
basic mode I suffer how I suffer and it’s all my fault is there a grant or
should I get an agent in all senses of the word literary and cultural and mask or
will my class ascent assuage your guilt is it ever inevitable or
do I remind you of the ilk you find both offensive and sexy or
a manufactured monster a caricature Chihuahua cubed the token the share or
a literal stranger at the knights’ table does my hesitation touch you or
my affect or my vision or my gears or my eternal indulgences or
when it gets added up and tallied by the chamber whoever that is and what I’ve earned or
haven’t earned even then even then will I be confirmation or inheritor
•
They built the US bunker in heaven
for the citizens who filled shelves
with formula guns toilet paper plates
and pallets of cans from Costco not just
for themselves but away from us
our bodies not supplicant enough
too marimacha not macho enuf bent coconut
too Black too much noisy too uppity
or like the saucy Univision talking head
who roasts oligarchs while the big network
reports on repeat that alien brown bodies
killed a woman in that haven San Francisco
and brown bodies put a baby
in a microwave in Missouri
and brown bodies loll by cacti
overteeming with a brown us
under a giant sombrero from Tijuana
and we all of us under the spell
of a new colonizing worm
construct hateful castes
sometimes wrongly in
an attempt to survive the boxes
how I could put my hips into it
like butterfly knives flicked out
of the pockets of the Xicana stereotypes
I aspired to while trying
preppie vowels the fraudulence of
belonging with my persona
still I survived and learned
to take each box apart
right to the cozy lap
of a college education
now I’m the thirteenth floor
•
I don’t actually know who the richest
person I’ve ever known is and that’s what
is so great about being an American and by
American I mean North American and by
North American I mean US and by US
I mean I’m a US citizen who may appear
to be rich to a lot of people so in a revolution
you can find me sleeping off my new status
hiding in a prison spoiler alert I believe in the state
in the end while the apocalypse roars outside
•
in another simultaneity
the end is corporate
in fire© and ice®
the meek go to work
because there is a workload
for the animal after death
she hurtles in deep space
where she can be a speck
of equal consequence
with the void
(after Pedro Pietri’s “Puerto Rican Obituary”)
•
they work their fingers
to the soul their bones
to their marrow
they toil in blankness
inside the dead yellow
rectangle of warehouse
windows work fingers
to knots of fire
the young the ancients
the boneless the broken
the warehouse does too
to the bone of the good
bones of the building
every splinte
r spoken for
she works to the centrifuge
of time the calendar a thorn
into the sole dollar of working
without pause work their mortal
coils into frayed threads until
just tatter they worked their bones
to the soul until there was no
soul left to send worked until
they were dead gone
to heaven or back home
for the dream to have USA
without USA to export
USA to the parts under
the leather sole of the boss
they work in dreams of working
under less than ideal conditions
instead of just not ideal
conditions work for the
shrinking pension and never
dental for the illusion
of the doctor medicating them
for work-related disease
until they die leaving no empire
only more dreams that their babies
should work less who instead
work more for less
so they continue to work
for them and their kin
they work balloon payment
in the form of a heart attack
if only that’ll be me someday
the hopeless worker said on
the thirteenth of never
hollering into the canyon
of perpetual time
four bankruptcies later
three-fifths into a life
that she had planned
on expecting happiness
in any form it took
excluding the knockoff
cubed life she lived in debt
working to the millionth
of the cent her body cost
the machine’s owner
Yolanda Berta Zoila
Chavela Lucia Esperanza
Naya Carmela Celia Rocio
once worked here
their work disappearing
into dream-emptied pockets
into the landfill of work
the work to make their bodies
into love for our own
•
when they revise the chronicles
the terms for naming us will
have to be something like
anational ones without the burden
of jingoism in a unique typeface
upper case optional
intended for topical use only
I’m willing to draft some
language to justify funding
an initiative for inscribing
our new title onto the landscape
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