Porcelain

The disturbing rise in violence is concurrent with a rise in hate crimes in general, which rose 5 percent in 2016, compared to the year before, as reported by the FBI. Of the 6,063 incidents involving 7,509 victims the FBI analyzed, 17 percent were targeted for their sexual orientation. Of the 17 percent, most of the victims were gay men. (NBC news, 2018).

One is not careful when one has their eyes closed
I became fundamental only after I lost my arms
Or he was in me, blood-letting, sparkling firework
On his lips, I was a curse often repeated, but less
Romantic to his friends, banal existence, rock
Hard, waiting for a pummelling, glasses
Broken, the conch had no power here
Lord of the misquotes and mosquitoes
Lord of the fireflies, buzzing in my fat
I dare not let him call me pig, but
Sometimes I whine like the swine
He expected me to be, brown body
Slick as porcelain, begging to be
Broken into pieces.

If one is not careful, decaying begins
Right after feasting, sun rots this precious
Meat, we sharpen the sticks and go chasing
Our desires, all muddy and savage like they
Expect us to be, a homo full of sin and sexual
Appetite, who wins but those prayers
My grandmother gives me a cross every
Time she sends a care package, one less
Soul to worry about, I swear, the heat
Aroused me and made this surface glow

And glistening, only less
White and perfect like that
Porcelain doll in her closet
Come closer you would see
Me not in the closet, but
Also devastatingly fragile.

 

Blood, Floating

For my mom, with love

rip those shiny wings off the fish
wrap a gem in its mouth and smoke it for hours
let the tender rip of its flesh fuel you
omega bit of memory and oil on your disaster.

I liked the way it felt when I touched myself
each gnarled finger painstakingly tracing
brown flesh, a carcass of al pastor, carne asada
ready for the blooding, ready for my mother to hate.

she created & washed me in her recollections
trauma of egg & the devil’s dust fueling
her appetite for consuming men and thus
creating me, choked by umbilicus, gnawing through every breath.

as dyed water flowed from her, a portrait of us
in the future loomed in the distant
reminder of fury, consuming a distressed body
ancestral curse lapping & licking up the juices of creation.

now I never sleep without a prayer though God and I don’t really get along
I guess you could say our memories are drowned in a water broken on impact
into this life, I won’t be back reminiscing on the past leaked out of the blood
my mother lost while birthing me, this floating image of my body and salvation

some curse in the water and when you listen closely, I swear you can hear the baby
before me, the brother I never knew—screaming.