birds against squirrels (words)

home · sound · poetry · academics · technology · personal statement

Soy dialogo entre misma y el espiritu del mundo. Yo me convierto, yo convierto el mundo. — Gloria Anzaldua

if i stand close enough, i breathe your skin
cells and the electronic mortar between them– –
sealed teeth around my voice banging against:
es intima, la lucha
metallic ivory
strained into milk, cracked around a word,
molded, our bodies try always
and stretch toward warmth—where you end and i begin,
a question

nuestras mentes, fronterizas
where we both are alive with the animals,
darkness stretches around the edges of fences, as if there are edges,
seams or fences in the darkness that is the dirt
under your fingers that is now the substance
of my hair

this space inside us is a neighborhood,
nuestro barrio, actually– –where we are, stars
between us, scars
among us, stitched red flaps
pulled together

si quieres el cambio
then work for what is right among our damp footsteps,
on a stretched wooden floor, this urgent summer,
that is our conversation,
an expanding circle– –
stretching toward coolness and radiance,
un nuevo principio
at home at the edge of indigo and facula,
a radiant belonging.

invasion

the men laugh outside the gate.
the cold of the night is an inscrutable
veranda, caught on videotape, rewound.
the long dark plank of sky muted
by the noise of light from the city is either
loneliness or independence, a perfect day.
you might call the police, you’re afraid
of the voices in the alley, afraid
they might be your own. mind
calling back to itself with the electricity
that only the friction of their laughter creates.
what is it? you ask from your bed.
what is it? your voice is the next step of waiting,
the atomized ring of the stove warming up,
warming wood. the house lights
up with your voice and all others remain outside.

it comes around again. dullness, reverberation, this act of repetition. however, ochre and eggplant, blooming in small circles, tiny and beautiful, a wish a dream a scene. my last thought was your yelling. but were you, on the corner yelling, or was that the fact of the earth coming back around again in the morning– –where i remember your arm heavy on my arm and hurting a bit but not in a way that would cause protest or movement, but just a crease that could be the sheet pressing skin for all i know– –the way the mind folds when it wants too much, or uses too much of itself, ugly and lonely and pink, smashed between paper in a textbook or pressed into a jar, laboratory. pink-flecked electricity, rubbery and small.

or you could've been yelling after all, your hands in your pocket where i couldn't see them. that makes sense. i've always frustrated things. i think there was a light behind you and i crossed my legs to put my toe in your shadow.

i remember when your glasses made a crease in the side of my face and then i imagined you crying because it was impossible to think you would, but i wanted to feel salt, along w/ the crease that you made. and the blood is still filling in that space on my cheek and it tingles w/ every year since, w/ its filling back up.

the texture of the face in sleep is gelatinous but powder. boiled bones and hope. i walk over the same floor boards each evening and there are times when i cross my legs to make shadows. maybe to say loss or maybe to say love i really don't know.

a comma a serenade a swell a comma a skin a curve a bicep a glass a bow a comma puddle a leaf a mirror a blanket a glass a line a curve a light a comma

a grey mirror a defeated call home a pair of glasses a forwarded address a black dress a broken bell a blue light a room full of lanterns

a smooth plastic curve, a breast, a sharp spark, an idea, fused silicon, a heartbeat, a spliced cell, a pregnancy, borrowed sinew, a step, oxygenated glass, a stare, fused titanium, a handshake, a polyurethane gloss, a light touch, a carbon fiber, a new word.

to the street corner where you grew up, to the language you used among the grasses as a child, to the glass in the gutter in front of the old house, to his shoe on the floorboard, to the murmurs in the churchyard, to the smeared plate in the sink, to the closet where you kept your private things, to the tiled bathroom that was a cell, to the small friend who would bring you crackers to stop you from crying, to that part of your body that you’ve tried to remove ever since, to his pollen dusted windshield where you would write your name and wait for the rain to make it disappear.

it is as if time were a commodity, the shrinking heat a test
and measure of patience. everything is burning.
the scales of the metallic piano make the fern drop a leaf
onto polished wood.
it is about control, the finger above the key, paused
and ignored over ivory, waiting to strike if it could
obscure the sound of the doorbell.
it is all burning. you do not give. you do not give.

control is time and we own it as purest possession. the rug in the parlor
is covered w/ dry, burned leaves. the violent vermillion of the wool
rug is covered w/ dry burned leaves.

what is this waiting. the room grows cool and the sun moves across
the room in dusty arcs. my hands become wood. there is no music
inside this artificial shell of light and plants, there is no such thing as time,
only your absence, which remains the loudest sound.

at the center of what you hide, a stone. the call home, striated speech and slick platitudes. you would only come downstairs to eat with us and complain about the president. i used to imagine that all the fathers in the neighborhood had two families, that they would leave for work in the city and would change their faces for strange children on weeknight dinners and walks along the main drag. i would wait for the weekend and would search your face for these changes, maybe a different line across your forehead would appear, maybe the color of your eyes would cede blue to hazel. maybe the newly mowed back yard would open up, right in the place where i would bury rocks and call them my orphans. maybe a hole would form there, rich and wet, and would tell us where you’ve been.