UNDEFINED RELATIONSHIP #12You said we shouldn’t make out anymore. Two days later I got a yeast infection. My GYN is texting: ¿Todavía te arde? My plan is to impose loneliness on you, in a headstand, breast to clavicle. When you get a really nice rejection letter, it’s like a guy thought you were awesome but fell in love with someone else. You’d made a list, it went: supportive, hot, intelligent, knows what he wants to do and does it. The no pile clings to that warmth in the other room. ¿Ya se te quitó el ardor o continúa? Like a feather not quite grazing. Do you miss me yet? I’m doce horas por tres días swigging a can of Best Sweet Tea. How much it had mattered to catch a cool worth pausing for. THE TIME I REALIZED I WASN'T WHITEI was nine and Grandma Miller introduced me at the San Diego Pentecostal church. I politely kissed her white friend on the cheek, to everyone’s shock, and burned a red backdrop to my freckles. A few years after my quinceañera my Spanish boyfriend corrected algo en las estructuras que no va flattened my accent in a cove of love a woman’s grievances folded in papers he’d lock away childish confetti. Feminism’s just a petty excuse for my voice silenced from radical to analyst from beacon to branded from brilliant to affirmative action from man to woman. I hide my phony diploma behind my leg check from the side of my eye if anyone’s looking. The white boy couldn’t get in anywhere because he was a white boy. The time I was most white was when at twenty-five I capitalized on your adolescence in Virginia knew your South Asian wouldn’t let you say no to me. That’s the time I saw myself in you. The time I was least white was when in Mexico a white man took my work and didn’t invite me to the party. In Spain at twenty-two my teacher called Latin America an insult to language in front of ten women and an institution that said the sun would do enough to dry me. One time I wasn’t white and didn’t realize was at nineteen in New York when Becca Stein said the Spanish street names in my poem were disorienting like is this Arizona or Mexico because the way you’ve situated the text is confusing —to a white woman. The time I felt most white was when at eighteen I read David Foster Wallace on SWE and agreed. The time I felt least white was when fuck you. The time I felt least white was when people only care if your camera won’t show your color negative if you can afford a camera, SWE, BMW, 401K. The time I was least white was when insurance is only for residents and they pick up the phone and say who’s speaking And I say María Fernández. The time I felt least white was when I had a skinny iced latte in Polanco and my girlfriends said Chicanos weren’t really Mexican. The time I felt most white was when I laughed along. BOYS ARE LIKE HOUSES IN A BIRACIAL, TRANSCONTINENTAL STATETwo stuffed bags. A closet arranged from purple to black, customary in Columbia dorms. Chucked an exam hangover into six human-sized boxes, followed by five-dollar margaritas spewing me blue on a viscid wood floor: six legs, three tongues, multiple smartphones testifying. Then an apartment furnished to eat at the liver, pinching it tight like money. Street finds to compensate: scrubbed record shelves, an impressionist yard framed in gold. My roommate’s thick glasses, eraser dust, notes almost rebooking the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Seven choking perfume spritzes, for luck. * Two hovering years. Adrià mutated from vellum to liberty, swan song eight times through the Caribbean. Multiplied his specter into nine human-shaped deposits, followed by muscles ticking me blue on my phone: indigent, deaf-eared, pinched in a heartbeat of lubricated ego. Then hypochondria spews herpes from whitescreen to skin, harking me back to his question. Street finds to compensate: a Texan jock, a cult child, Adonis stealing his pinesmell. Erased to a new stability, a gust of wait, the future scudding out on overstretched tentacles. Left a sludge slipway, for luck. * Two potioned poems. Concocted relationships cursing my drive from genesis to mud, buried nine ribs down from atonement. My brain vacuumed into human-sizing mirrors, followed by tweezers clipping me red on a cortisone lake: YouTube yoga, insomniac, a sallow bed of cesspooled escapism. Then twenty-seven strands of rejection letters, pinning a desiccated moth to a millennial sense of purpose. Metaphysical steals to compensate: a poem Mónica de la Torre wrote in my dream, God’s voice channeled through a grimy garrafón, a therapist. Churned by a threat cue choked in shoelace, a propulsion cradled in tissue flesh, clouds spelling tedium to amaranth. Oiled ten hands in violet, for luck. DIVORCEthere is a thought of you showing up in mexico white gardenias clutch two fingers on yours in a cab but the current seeps through pipes flushed toilets echoes of footsteps underfloor i put the kettle on the bottlebrush pear stem and purple afterlights exist in spite of us the way you hug me a smoked chicken at the center of a birthday cake our walls frame the one space we’ve abandoned so we cross our sheet hurricane to a five-month atlantic where we send each other poems just to say you’re beautiful still beautiful ✱✱✱
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