“soon we’ll be people again”
Raquel Salas Rivera
west philly summer 2018
so hot you want to
shave your eyebrows group ice
in a sock
and break the slick
off the glass
pour out the air that’s trapped
in all the cupboards called stores distance
the drinks from faucets divvy up the water
ride waves of some glimpsed
hell scarred backwards into its
opposing linger
you come down cussing out the sun
spitting up red through the light
leveling out the rage
hot so
you dip your face in icecream pools lap
up the cracks
ant corpses littering playgrounds dying
dried-out on jungle gyms half
crossed sliding
into dead sparrows
hot enough to harbor a grudge
head out to sea to show
up at the wrong door with a timber and a fuck you
when you see a mail truck and think
it’s a whale
carcass holding in leagues
of carved out faces you imagine ghosts
grooming plastic plants
daliesquescapes into brick-hunting insoles and
every corner store waves
a white flag called we sell ice summer is
a luxury season
hot
going to hold it down block by
block the earworm that sweats
into sputtering a desire to spit at
every white question
every nice house with a.c. clean lawns sprinkled
dreams of buyé out in the open
i’m not from here so gimme a minute
to remember streams enough to make do locking
into the overture a chipped-toothed sun laughing
through a heavy cloud still
hot but could be rain and
stuck in a noon dodging
in to buy our way through degrees
of lessening sudden cut
and honk of a delivery gone awry from festered
flashes of a memory tank barging wood
sinister in its splintering age should be
better than metal but
only the fireflies know we
mean to leave this planet
until someone brings water
you can’t decide if beer is
what we need just to numb through yellow
discus thrown out into the trash heavens
as if we were cursed
to live this out until we can heal it or
repay winter we tremble
in thirst
as if wishing a downpour from our
bodies out into
the symmetry of water just above the road
seeing things
seething things or
broken on hubs in a park
promising relief tree-ridden
sick with green heavy onwards
trapping mosquitoes against thighs
a sacrifice for night
saying bring it down into
the insole of a bold-faced lie called
we’re cool
not today
or ever
again going to be a cold bone between us sarcophagi
we call litmus of all other hatreds the belly of the earth
much better the pig in the mud of this body cooling off
in a shade
rasping its skin off on the bark
until breaking into the flesh
of it ray by ray
the divided seconds
of day of it
unsustainable and fountain-bound
heading into the fray
holding on by dear cube shirt high or”off into the shrubs
packing corners with unused lengths
i say soon we’ll be people again i promise
we’ll order in and return
to mimicking survival to our slow declines
and handheld hopes sort of not
knowing how to wield them but still battling away
from wrist flicking out gesturing at
waterfalls pools
icebergs melted into things we can eat
or drink or dribble as if talking
but really what i say is soon we’ll be people again
and no one is listening from however we aren’t
ice arrests the usual called making it matter hot
in cages
in el yunque bald-headed
across the beach of my past stretched out
my body of water
my mountainous descent into the city
and the coast of a city hit by rivers where
swimming is ill-advised
secretly thinking
soon
we’ll be better
than the people we were
better than summer
we’ll be scattered showers
we’ll be sun-down and broken
a headstone struck by its own force
rivulets across its cracked face
taking us over
*
“900 Chocolate Hearts A Minute At The Candy Factory”
CAConrad
estimate number of
near-misses after
interrupting the
angel prying your
father’s jaws apart
fashioned on tip of a fork
car horn at door to the birth canal
living section of dawn cooking inside the poet
today is the day we reject this vexing sell-by date worry
no guarantee we will cohere in our broken patch of garden
when you look at me you see
mostly water who will
one day hasten to
join a cloud
a thing I know for
certain is to cook
companionship into
food to taste and
become fellowship
eat a leaf with a hole
to share nourishment
with a future butterfly
you believe in sharing
at least you used to
I know you want
to shock me with
reports of enjoying
gloryholes and I can
act shocked to amuse
you yet I wonder if you
ever look up to the wall
thinking it will be his eyes
__________________________________
Excerpted from We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, edited by Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel. Used with permission of Nightboat Books.
