ay, perrra.

¿que me dicen perra? uy si, que voy a ser su perra. es que parezco mujer. les doy miedo. cuando me ven se espantan. han de ser muy machotes. les deberías ver sus ojos: blancos, con engaño, burla, dolor y enojo. que no soy su perra, que no me bajo de la bici y que no me quito el pantalón y que no tenga tapón. que tengo pito. que hago pipí parado, se asustan. pero no me lo dicen. sé que me ven en el baño y quieren decir algo, pero nunca encuentran las palabras. y se disculpan los muy caballerotes. perros. lo de que mis chichis no estén grandes no les importa, con las nalgas tienen. pero ahi las ves. ¿que me dicen perra? uuuy. ¿que me ponga a gatas y les huela el culo luego luego? eyyy. ¿cuál perra? soy gata. soy la mía.

re re: it’s how it starts

unapologetically blunt
i am sick of your manías
it’s how it starts: we laugh nervously
we do not know what to say
you shut me up with kisses
quiet my mind
with glances
that confuse even the surest of blind prophets
and adivinos.

tu misterio es un enigma
an unfathomable puzzle
i can’t put a finger on you
i can’t exactly locate where you stand
your words never cease to astound
my twisted little bumbling bee heart
stored in its hive
pecho de miel envenenada.

while i make you shitty breakfast
you have the common courtesy to complain
to face the mirror right in front of me
you’re playing chess
i’m stuck on checkers
i never learn.

your absence makes me dawdle on useless shit
counting every second
til i get to see you again
a grapple chokehold sung in the pulse of an endless clock
i’m coughing out cheap lyrics
spitting cheap bottles of wine drowned
in putrescent phlegm
the kind you make me gag and write these lines with
just cuz you deserve it
i throw up just contemplating
a future without you
or with you
and that is certain
specifically sentimental your answers make me
not ever eradicating
preocupación
mistaken beliefs
or wiry wishes.

i will never have you
but even worse
you will never have me
and that
my dear
is what kills me.

i sleep on the street
just to appease
placate
my selfish whims
you shamelessly expose my contradictions
unwillingly vulnerable
a spotlight on my vast
inferior superego
uncomforting awkward insecurities.

you make me forget
who i am and
who i was before
you were you and i was i
and we were we.

i don’t remember
that way
you used to look at me
eyes clasped open
foreboding doom.

and no
i can’t recall
the village of your
bodily hair
unfurnished
invoking
winter rose field hues.

i lack the will
to reexamine
the sonoric cadencia
of your
risas
the alliteration of your
annoying anxious and antithetical
laughter
polished pearls posing in post-productive polyplacement.

stop making me
reminisce
represent
and reinvigorate
the spilled soggy traces
of clogged control
you will not have your way with me
i will not gleefully succumb
to your mountainous muffled moans
okay yes i wll
but that’s not the point.

because no
i don’t care to revisit
recollect
and reincarnate
the desperate makeout sessions
in the back of the beatup 4runner
twisted metal
encapsulating naive desires
drenched in eternal confidence
a distant sky displaying desertioni did not memorize the
fluid danza steps of your mouth
tequila stained tongues
shifting in a frenzy.

and yet: yes
i do regret
the manner in which
you disposed of me
the other night
trampling, muting footsteps
nimble and feline
you walked all over me
as your specter vanished
and i
i still came back
for more.

si, queridos antropólogos

a julio cortázar–

ojos de ojos
oreja
mano
pie
pescuezo
pendejo
pellejo
piedra de las avenidas mocas
motecas cortazarianas
desfilan desnudas
para que todo el mundo
las vean
las lean
en las deseadas páginas
multicolor
de la ultima edición
del
national geographic.

si
son cuerpos
si, queridos antropólogos
lo que ve ahora mismo
es el cuerpo
el texto ensangrentado
las greñas
arrancadas de las puntas pelotas
de la
p[v]ágina.

la equis excelsior

always rising higher
la equis excelsior
it takes a bridge to get there
slanging tamales de puerco pollo jalapeño and chis
the lady strains to remember your face
verdes vallas mostrando verdura del chico y el grande
water tower recuerdos of late night walks estilo jalisco
como la birria
i want to go

the x
home of Larry the toothless can dispatcher
whistling and lisping stories of brooklyn subway roofs
and Janet the shady landlady
bottoms up fights at 2:13 in the morning
had enough?
the x
your friend who always cards you
have a good night my fren
how you doin my fren
but no one is his only friend
maybe the sound of the cars
more likely your money

cats, street cats beggin for change
ol señora on all fours
worshipping a can of steel reserve
her royal staff a cancer stick
her crown a burst of ashes
blessings, queen

the ex
right around the corner from where dj qbert
made his first beat from skratch
in that garage halfway open
where you can walk from paris
to london
to lisboa
to madrid
all a stones throw away
geography is a clusterfuck here
but did you ever stop to question
why they renamed china
or japan
and why persia is persia and not iran
is it cuz of bomb bomb bomb, bom bom iran?

sfpd soldiers string the woven siren’s steady soundtrack
across the mission corridor that dissects you
subway sandwiched between bayview and ingleside
don’t ever call her outer mission (no no no)

the ecks
vieja de las ocho décadas
que nos llamó sinvergüenzas
saca a ese vato o lo saco yó
todo por holding your hand, peleonera

its your tierra natal
te llaman calle
hopelessly i sought you
on a half-disclosed acid trip
woke up with you in my hands
walking on a misty mclaren park dawn

mama i ain’t waiting
i ain’t waiting but im still holding on
as the sardinian fourteen orders me to
“please hold on”
and yet
i can’t let go
here
in la equis
the x is up to you.

your great-grandpappy

your great-grandpappy’s great-grandaddy
killed mis abuelos, mis abuelas.
and you’re there, holding on,
the last train to the east bay promises
safe and warm comfort
no more running.

“the last train to the east bay is coming in 3 minutes,”
a nasily robotic voice amplified through the 24th street station announces.
no pressure.
midway through the procession, after the party had begun
i arrive anxiously acordándome de mis antepasados
samba, the drum of the danza and east coast hip hop masks
the whispering wails of our dead and dying earth mother.

childish cheering from the mouth of the settler-colonialst class
captures succintly the intention of this date
we are truly celebrating death
welcoming the ghostly mass of faces painted white
white faces painted more white with touches of color and black
blackness enveloping the spirits of those whose land we stepped on.
“the last train to the east bay is coming in 2 minutes”
no pressure.

agglomeration of altares erected for the sake of passive consumption
no room for honoring the dead
no place to show respect
just tall hands with tall cans
paying tribute to their dying livers
their laughing gives me shivers
i must leave this place now
i must free myself from their scattered stares
and seek my own place of blessings
meditations, prayers and
ometeotl.
“the last train to the east bay is coming in 1 minute”
no pressure.

and now you’re there, holding on
holding on to your pending vomit
holding on to your fake indigenous headdress
stop insulting my abuelos mis abuelas
stop spitting on their graves
it’s killing me, on this day of death
how much you’re missing the point
and yet
i missed the point, the process, the procession
and let you take over my mind
i wished ghastly death upon your future generations and those who came following you
just so that one day,
maybe one day,
you’d understand why.

.

poema al escritor en la Soledad

Al candil en el fondo oscuro del alma de un bolígrafo; eclipse largo, flaco, estancado por su propio peso. blinding, penetrating darkness. all in flames, bullets are the voice of the voiceless forced to wear masks to uncover their true Nature: the myth of the isolated Poet, “let there be Words,” Creator of the first uni-verse. I named her-him:

Anzaldúa, walking on the border fence, left foot on one side, right on the other, dignity in queer humyn form.
Borges, in his grandmother;s library, speaking something que se oía extraño– turns out it was English.y tú, Cortázar, his mysterious motecas en motocicleta, swallowed me up into the novel and strangled the protagonist myself; I always get the dirty jobs.
de Cervantes, la novela was never the same, quixotically you ventured far, far como en las caballerías.
Guevara, a writer above all, and he died one, with feelings of love caught up in flash photography.
mi tocayo, Hemingway, I’ve never read his work; I prefer the wolves of the Steppes and Siddartha, by Hesse.
I, Me, and You, in first, second, and third person, omniscient and omnipresent, the narrator went missing in Jeanmarie, found dead in a shallow grave unmarked by the passage of linear time.
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, reading in her candlelit study, dressed in cura-drag laughing while writing a response.
Lorca, romancero gitano, la rebelión republicana sobrevivió con tu memoria, martirizado fuiste por un miedo franquista.
mon Xerí Moraga, I dipped my finger in Coyolxauhqui’s period blood and constructed a painted storyboard plot, hatched to fight back against Huitzilopochtli’s jealousy.
next was Neruda, he made me love [write to] you, I ripped a sonnet from his hands, re-appropriated it and called it mine and yours, our romance lasted the length of a long-forgotten love letter never mailed.
Poe, manipulating many mysteries the day the lector of literatura became detective.
quióbole, Quevedo, que los muros de la patria tuya se tumbaron, pero para que se construyeran otros en la mía; quionda con eso.
Rulfo Rulfo Rulfo, es que el tiempo jaliscience es muy muy largo, han pasado tantas horas desde que saliste a pie, a pata ráiz, y aun no ha muerto el padre cargando al hijo, la pluma encanchada asoleada en un llano lejano.
Salinger, jaded jaydee, I honestly hated Catcher in the Rye, what a waste of time that was.
Trumbo, re[a]d-and-blacklisted for telling the truth about Johnny.
Vonnegut, you son of a gun, I took an AP class once and became entrapped like a chicken in your slaughterhouse, I even acted out a scene and filmed myself reinterpreting your dreams.
Williams, spitting sacred syllables, Saul Stacey on the Solstice of december twenty-first provoked galactic alignments foretold, slinging rocks on Saturn rings like Gaza children.
X, you changed your name twice in order to change the Wor[l]d, and you were murdered twice for it.
Zeta Acosta, sparking rebellions of East Los cucarachas, spicy like Sri Racha.

and well, copywriting intellectual property Rites of passages quoted, I surely convinced myself that I was the one who wrote this, when You were the One(Two), the Alpha[bet] and the OM[eteotl]ega.

steady como en el eská

el ritmo de your footsteps
steady como en el eská
los pasos que your hands describe
woven helixes del tiempo dado.

muéreme como en las muvis
esas que we rented hace mucho
esas de las gangs, pachucos
esas las de eses, y esas.

cántame como en el circo
esfera de curtain calls and costumes
your vocal cords sin costumbre
sin despojos ni disfraz.

cuéntame como en el cuento
como es que you changed your name
how your movimiento got rid of
your slave label and became XicanX.