“How the Body Can Be a Sky to Hold the Stars”
—after Karla Cordero
The mole that orbited back and forth between his forehead and cheekbone
has finally found sanctuary on his right temple.
It burns bright like a star equidistant from the helix of his ear
and the lateral canthus of his eye—
a distance traveled only by a tearful little dipper.
His eyes, their nebulous steeliness, are my mother’s:
strong, brown, unbreakable; hard to read, easily wounded;
silent spheres that quickly turn as the moon, from phase to phase.
They’re eyes born to suffer—annuli of pain—
twin celestial bodies steeled for the impact
of meteorites and comets, space debris, mediocrity and regret.
They smile, though never in photographs,
and laugh with a silence that can only be heard
from afar as the sparkles of intergalactic jewels
that do so without care or inhibition, unaware or burdened by earthly gazes.
The chiaroscuro beneath his eyes is burdened by the phrase,
my mother’s refrain: “your son is my new Pepito, my new you;
a new chance to make things right.”
He lies in his crib, unfazed, as the orbs inside my head
remember that as bright as she may be,
the moon is nothing but stone with no brilliance of its own—
a mere reflection of the sun—just as my satellites and his
are but mere moons to my mother’s Jupiter;
eyes don’t produce their own light,
their brilliance and power emanates from the eyes they remind you of,
their cores, cones and rods, as they age, create heavier and heavier elements,
a sorrow that remains in the iris as an afterimage.
But mostly, his eyes remind me of hers when he cries
because light years ago, in a faraway place we once called home,
she used to paint most starless nights with a big dipper full of tears.
“Ode to the Testicles”
—after Sharon Olds
The apocalypse is very becoming of you fresh out of the shower—
flesh pink and silken, tenderized by streams of scalding droplets—
in nothing but the red “Go Nats!” T-shirt we bought, ironically,
back when we were so sure of many things: our love, life
and the Dodgers making it to a third straight World Series.
Steam plumes leave your eyes, half open, so naked and helpless
without your rose crystal glasses that I question whether the blur you see
draped comfortably on teal olefin is me or a vision of what could be.
They say that one cannot be afraid of what one cannot see and yet I wonder
if I have the balls to go on living without you knowing
that half the things you say or do drive me nuts.
Locked in our one-bedroom quarantine state, we seek shelter
from the quagmire looming outside our front door, the stuff muddying
the fourth and final horseman’s clip-clops in the hallway.
We blanket ourselves with one another—dark on light skin—at the edge
of the couch as the death tally ticks faster than time tolls, the news reports,
at the speed of truth, as the ignoble steed eats away at society’s foundations
as easily as layered hay bales, and the body stacks pile at the end of the world.
I look into your blue eyes as if it were the first time, as if it were the last—
wondering if we’ll be raised from the dead after this lazaretto—
and I try to count the problems that plague us and multiply
in this tiny space surrounded by walls labeled,
“Temporary: En route to forever home.”
In spite of this virus, I’m still able to lie to your face with no vaccine to cure
this learned behavior in sight. Our lies and promises were easy to make when life
was almost certain and walking out was as simple as turning a knob, ignoring the
huffing nag, and never looking back.
But when breath is death—its cold grasp, another’s touch—
our fights, breakouts and, as rage, remorse and rambling course through
our safer-at-homebodies, our breakthroughs will lead us to a place
in which the pale horse can find peace, quiet and pasture on which to graze.
As I lay with you in my arms, you cup my scrotum
and its vaginal tunics as lovingly as if it were a heart:
the only heaven I’ve ever known. I exhale away from your face
lest I fog up the glasses I fetched for you from the wet vanity
and this be the last time you see me, the final breath we share as one.
“Ode to the Corpus Cavernosum and Her Sister, Spongiosum or (Cuando Todo Se Va a La Verga)”
—after Boards of Canada’s Sixtyniner, from the album Twoism
“Wow nice, you are going to be a father,”
she texted late one night, well, 7:38 p.m. in LA, late for her in New York.
She was my ex and I, her why?
The mail body of handwritten letters and Yoko Ono postcards
we were supposed to make together was aborted
for a ghosting of texts and haphazard selfies.
How selfish of me to not think of her as mother material,
her hips and womb, as yoke and beast of uterine burden.
It was my way of forgetting her,
how I chose to ward off her gentle eyes,
the warm sensation of how she used to kiss me
and dig her untrimmed fingernails into my twin tissue
as if it were dirt primed for seed.
“When is he due?” she texted two hours later.
“June,” I replied.
“You know… ours would’ve been a Virgo.”
The baby—our oneness—we dreamed of after we’d each reach
our own version of orgasm inside the secret ward
we had built out of hours of Beatles’ music, sencha tea, and her virginity,
her “virgin” in her “English,” which wasn’t necessarily broken, but quite fragile:
a place so unlike the world outside of it that,
when I touched her, I couldn’t feel her;
I’d gaze upon her, yet I couldn’t see her.
When our mouths were layered lip on lip
like a cake, a spongy upside down cruciform with all the fixings,
our teeth were retracted, tongues intertwined,
breaths protracted, but I still felt the bite.
She spoke, I listened, but I couldn’t hear her:
we were as two cosmic travelers lost in outer space,
no longer two but together, not lovers yet too in love
with nowhere to go but outside of our creation;
both of our virtues faced forward,
blinking as clear as Lennon-McCartney harmonies,
as black and white as MS-DOS waiting for an answer, a command,
toward one another—inward—usward.