John Manuel Arias
Featured Poet
coffy and la cumparsita
tonight she feltches battery acid into his missing eyes he wriggles like a baby bird
mid orgasm and blurts out I’ve just made love to a shotgun because she’s
sawed off at the waist he’s a magician he’s the one who’s done this to her
the latest Soul Train episode is muted because they can’t really afford sound
instead he hums her father’s favorite tango it’s a funerary spell cried out
at the mouth of a river where barges are swallowed
where she swallows him
where she too is swallowed
surrounded by clouds of horseflies she leaves her father alone in a park steals
his tongue right out of his mouth mid sentence
he was humming his
favorite tango
it’s wintertime and he reaches out to embrace the cold and rigor mortis like
childhood friends they’d played futbol together in a field in front of a church
in front of a gun factory where mothers gave birth to metal and
fathers abandoned them anyway
she points the rifle at his forehead and leaves a perfect pencil-thin blast the
other kidnapper the one who’d been shoveling diamonds into his ass instead of
their cartoonish money bags begs
for mercy but she’s an action star a femme fatale in velvet shoulder
pads her ovaries hum her father’s favorite tango her finger squeezes the shy trigger
on the pavement she scrapes up her ankles because you have to jump out of a window
when a head explodes because heads explode like grenades in Montevideo
her mother waits behind the reporters gargling a greenish liquid that tastes like
breast milk she’s now her husband’s mausoleum and some familiar song
goes unheard inside
this is the first ever live-action television broadcast
¿why did you do it?
give us the scoop
why is everything they ask so complicated?
those Tupamaros in the bank elevator
her fiancée bathed in acid
her father in a cloud of horseflies
and now the reporters
¿will he ever be loved?
tell us, tell us
he’ll never know
it can be our little secret
in the darkness of our brick and lead basement she’s paced back and forth
for the past 10 years leaving a furrowed grave the size and shape of her shame
on the television her interview is a rerun that cuts off at the last minute
at the very best part and now after so long she’s forgotten the question
but all my life the answer has hummed in her
head like the echo of a tango that was her father’s favorite
Devices: on the 90 bus at 6:18 AM,
after a one-night stand
without turning around
a crack-
head says to me:
child, there are
devices…
there are devices that
breach our
dreams and tell us
we’re not
ourselves anymore
and I think: ¿how many
times… how
many times have I
woken up
from dreams with the
feeling
that I wasn’t myself?
she turns and says
look here—
don’t even worry, because
this world
will forget you anyway
and whether
or not you’re the same person
today or
awake don’t matter
baby boy, if you’re here,
you’re dreaming
and if you’re over there
you’re dreaming
and if you think you’re
awake
then you’re still sleeping
¿you want my advice?
stay
sleeping
because waking up is a bitch
for somebody
who ain’t themselves tomorrow
aileen wuornos was eleven
and a half when she died
you crouch slowly in a barren field
and on all sides, there’s nothing but
mountain, acheronian sky
the marching wildfire of ants
Guanacaste trees shiver like grave markers
like unnecessary crosses around
old women’s necks
at noon you crouch lower
watering the dry earth with blood and urine
nourishing a bursting seed in hopes
of a flower that will someday bring you rain
breath-hold breakpoint
when you drowned a mouse in the glass your grand-
mother still drinks from / two tiny bubbles / perfectly
round and fragile / blew out from its ears
so / I gotta ask / when you drowned yourself
in that same glass / and those bubbles cupped
your lovely ears / ¿what is it you heard?
soraya montenegro is a fictional character in the mexican telenovela María la del barrio
right when it’s over, he kisses both your eyes, tasting everything you
find beautiful: dark lovers scratched out from the black, the face you make on camera
when you don’t know you’re being filmed, a pistol blooming from in between
your fingers
love skulks in like an invalid peacock, crippled by the weight of being wanted
crushed by the weightlessness of not
it unfurls its feathers with witchcraft, sways them like an eye blinking
you curl your torso into a shadow when it throws you gently against three walls
painted with asbestos and someone else’s ashes
from a key hole, you observe him with your body, as full of life as you’ve ever
seen it—you won’t admit that he’s the reason why the ghosts in your bedroom holler out
at night why they bang themselves against unopened windows
he’s incense that traps them there, sage that burns them to blackened logs in a
fireplace you’d hurled yourself into, candied embers caught in your
teeth, a singe at the end of your tongue, a flame too delicious not to swallow
sprawled out on the sandalwood floor, you’re a match, ready
he hovers over you like smoke; you splinter you’re tinder; he’s watching
preparing, because you love to break in his presence just so he can try to fix you
