This week for Literary Hub’s Poem of the Week feature we turn over the reigns happily to Nepantla: A Journal Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color. Please be sure to support their magazine by checking out their brand new second issue launching at Lambda Literary’s website next week. –AF 

Joshua Jennifer Espinoza is a trans-woman poet from Southern California. We first met during a reading for the TRANS PLANET POETRY TOUR. Her poetry is raw, quirky, depressingly hilarious, and politically conscious. Her images are familiar yet surprising, her music is subtle and unforced (found in repetition, alliteration), her line-breaks leave me constantly suspended in her poems. When I read Joshua Jennifer Espinoza’s work I am laughing then crying, I am passive then outraged. Her poems are so subtly complex. It’s a privilege to feature Joshua Jennifer Espinoza and 22 other amazing poets in Nepantla Issue #2 (launching on the Lambda Literary website Thursday, September 17th).

—Christopher Soto

I Dream of Horses Eating Cops

i dream of horses eating cops
i have so much hope for the future

or no i don’t

who knows the sound a head makes when it is asleep
my dad was a demon but so was the white man in uniform
who harassed him for the crime of being brown

there are demons everywhere
dad said
and he was right but not in the way he meant it

the sky over san bernardino was a brilliant blue when the winds kicked in
all the fences and trash cans and smog scattered themselves
and the mountains were on fire every day

i couldn’t wait to die or be killed
my woman body trapped in a dream

i couldn’t wait to wake up
and ride off into the sunset
but there isn’t much that’s new anywhere

the same violence swallows itself and produces bodies
and names for bodies

i name my body girl of my dreams
i name my body proximity
i name my body full of hope despite everything
i name my body dead girl who hasn’t died yet

i hope i come back as an elephant
i hope we all come back as animals
and eat our fill

i hope everyone gets everything they deserve

Christopher Soto (aka Loma) is a queer latin@ punk poet & prison abolitionist. Their first chapbook Sad Girl Poems is forthcoming from Sibling Rivalry Press. They cofounded The Undocupoets Campaign with Javier Zamora & Marcelo Hernandez Castillo in 2015. They’ve interned at the Poetry Society of America & received an MFA in poetry from NYU. They edit Nepantla: A Journal Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color with the Lambda Literary Foundation. Originally from the Los Angeles area, they now live in Brooklyn.