Inspired by Maqoma’s Cion: Requiem of Ravel’s Boléro,
Água Viva by Clarice Lispector, and “Some Thoughts on Mercy” by Ross Gay

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Repetition, another name for spin, a guide to prayer.

Pleated touch of root to palm
I breathe and you stomp,
I breathe and we sing.
Like we did in temple every Sunday
even though I never learned
how to read the words I followed
the flow and rose and fell
with the momentum of hope.

Deep shudder as I
inch across the threshold of
this sacred house. I’m
8 years old on a class trip and
from what I’ve learned
these cathedral ceilings may soon collapse and
fall on my head. So I
look down, to the side, pray
to a God I’ve never known. My being

splitting like light through stained glass
whispering my respect and

hoping if He is real let His kindness
ring more true, than the

burning shame I’ve heard
discharging from my father’s pestilential mouth.

<

Family lore repeats itself, grinding out pathways to be generationally retread, wearing down soles on roads that once escaped to refuge but now lead to empty lots and a mausoleum. Don’t reach out to your relatives in Israel, they only want money. to your Aunt Dorothy, she’s greedy and self-involved. to your cousin Susan, she’s strange and her house smells like wet dogs. to Abuela with her cold gaze that never smiles. But those hands with the delicate fingers that stirred honey and límon into chamomile tea when I was sick and home from school– that cheeky smile worn last Christmas as her hands passed turrón around the table– but those hands were Abuela’s. Spoiled bitch. Good girl. Crazy clown. What a talent. You make it really hard to love you. Noone will ever love you like I do. Oh, god, she’s crying crocodile tears, again. A narrative is not truth. It is words arranged in a way that haunts. We swallow their moral tales until we don’t know if they were told to us or we made them up ourselves. >

I watch you watching me, wondering,
worried that you’re judging me for what
you think I assume
about you, about who
is the criminal and who
is the thief and what
is being stolen is the possibility of crafting
a new play that forgoes
winning in favor of peace. Naive
maybe, but there is wisdom in innocence

My sister is 8 years old. We’re getting ready
for my Mother’s graduation celebration. I tell her
to wash her hands for dinner. She looks up
and straight at me and says
But all the hands in the world are dirty.
Touché little Wiseman

At a birth. Violence committed
in silence. Deemed clean
by virtue of a need,
to show it can be done, but not
by us. We will always be stained. Blood
that no amount of bleach will make right

Our bug bodies consuming, belching,
digesting our ancestral stories in this present gut.

Always broken up. Always breaking off.
My identity like a Hydra:
multiplying in time. Multiplying
each time the story shifts.
Never really losing, but constantly gaining. More
fractions, more opinions, more
voices balanced by paradoxical symmetry

>

I rest my head in your lap, ask you to tell me:
Why am I good? With firm hand
you bend me backwards, pointing at
the Ouroboros’s tail.
My painted nails pinching it
between my toes. I tug and see
as the snake stops gagging,
casually slithers off.

It’s a story, you say.
We love them and we need to be wary of them

For every serpent choking
on its tail, there is another waiting
to be fed his own.

We can run around chopping in half
all that wriggle, and slide, and sneak.
While it’s not for me to say:
There are some that deserve it.

Or we can show compassion
to ourselves for getting entranced
And to them for being charmed
into pushing their reflections onto us,
creating a cracked mirror out of the world.

<

The sign is not new.
It leans to the side as if agog
watching the small blue crabs scurry
and fight with their one large arm
raised toward the capricious coastal sky.

Aviso. Cocodrilos Presentes.
Caution. Crocodiles are Present.

I am not new
to this sign. This is
my backyard. Familiar suction of
humus around my toes; banana
spiders filling in the blanks in the canopy;
tens to hundreds of gnats and mosquitoes
taking turns alighting and leaving
itchy pink footprints on my bare arms
and under the thin cotton of my shirt.

I carefully step among the mangroves
whispering my respect,
feeling my bare feet sink an inch
deeper into the decaying
plant and animal matter
compacted with
rain and brackish water.

2.54 centimeters further
into unknowable depths
to make my pulse quicken. I consider
turning back. Turning away
from this place that
gnashes and devours everyone
of its children. Cursing the comprehensive
breathing roots climbing over each other
like mangled skeletons in a charnel house.

I’m not breathing. Trapped in
an orbit between dread and disgust.
I look up to break
the loop, inhaling a dank, sweet
smell of rotting crabmeat
not unlike honey;
earthy, pungent,
fruity.

Something sings out of my mouth. Tingles
vibrate up my neck and in my ears.
My lips pressing together when
I notice I’m crying. A swell rising
in my chest. Te amo
I hear myself humming. Thank you
The muscles in my legs relax into the wet earth;
no longer trying
to stay above and apart. But to stay
tucked into this gurgling gut, this pocket of eternity.

Variegated sunlight streaks
through the branches. I go
following the dancing mosaic;
aquamarine, ruddy ruby, tangerine
shimmer along the decomposing and fertile ground.

Finally I reach treeline, ankle deep,
laughing. Across the threshold
sprinting into the low tide
of the bay. Small fish race up and down
meeting my toes, taking
little ticklish nibbles of
dead skin. Tracing
the flow, the rise, and the fall
of waves as depicted
by the rippled lines in the sand.
Pleated touch of root to palm.

<>