The Best Prey Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfillment of The

The Best Prey

Thesis

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Masters of Fine Arts in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

Paige Valentine Quiñones, B.A.

Graduate Program in English

The Ohio State University

2016

Thesis Committee:

Kathy Fagan Grandinetti, Advisor

Marcus Jackson

Paige Quiñones

2016

Abstract

The Best Prey is a collection of poetry that explores the forces of nature, gender, and violence on its female speaker. It is poetry of place, both in psychic and physical spaces.

It is poetry which is not complacent with power dynamics, predation, and sexual violation. The voice of this collection grows from one of family portraiture, to one navigating queerness in a heterosexual life, and finally undergoes a metamorphosis of understanding her own mentalities, animal tendencies, and how to push back against a forceful male presence.

Acknowledgments

Great thanks to Kathy Fagan Grandinetti for her guidance and commitment to my writing. Thanks as well to Marcus Jackson, Andrew Hudgins, and Henri Cole, for their patient and thorough feedback.

iii

Vita

May 2009 ...... J.W Mitchell High School

May 2013 ...... B.A. English, Spanish, University of Florida

August 2013 to present ...... Graduate Teaching Associate, Department

of English, The Ohio State University

Publications

“Apophenia. Muzzle Magazine. 2016

“Honeymoon” and “Lake Alice on a Sunday Morning.” Quarterly West. 2015

“Daughters I Haven’t Met” and “I Pay the Girl.” The Boiler Journal. 2015

“I Dreamed in Spanish Once” and “Mastectomy, or My Mother.” The Siren. 2014

Fields of Study

Major Field: English

Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii

Acknowledgments ...... iii

Vita ...... iv

Table of Contents ...... v

Dueña del Bosque ...... 1

Self Portrait as Graffitied Woman on a Wynwood Wall ...... 3

Sacrifice ...... 7

La Operación ...... 9

March 1, 1954 ...... 11

On Visiting My Grandparents’ Unmarked Grave ...... 13

Mastectomy, or My Mother ...... 15

Stargazing With My Father ...... 17

Beside the Abuelo’s Deathbed ...... 18

Elegy for the Music Teacher ...... 20

Veteran ...... 22

Epithalamium ...... 24

I Dream of My Future Child ...... 26

In Which the Lover Watched As ...... 28

I Dreamed in Spanish Once ...... 30

Seahorse Polyamory ...... 32

Lake Alice on a Sunday Morning ...... 34

Cat After Labor ...... 36

New York Sonnet ...... 37

Daughters I Haven’t Met ...... 38

I Pay the Girl ...... 40

Harlot, Strangler ...... 42

Honeymoon ...... 44

Blood Sport ...... 46

Baby Fever ...... 48

Poem for the Girl Who Loves Girls ...... 50

Ode to My Womb ...... 51

Ouroboros ...... 53

Apophenia ...... 55

Ode to Hysteria, Ode to Anhedonia ...... 58

The Hole in My Side Was Nothing Like Christ’s ...... 61

Outside the Psychiatric Hospital ...... 63

On the Duality Of ...... 65

Nude Beach ...... 67

Bipolar and its Related Disorders ...... 69

Changeling ...... 71

Aguadilla ...... 73

That Which I Consider Untamable ...... 75

Miami Mythos ...... 76

The Avenue ...... 79

Things to Do in the Belly of a Whale ...... 81

Huracán ...... 83

vii

Dueña del Bosque

You think you can return to that place

where your tameless tía

climbed down from the mountain,

where roads bend without reason,

blanketed in feathers.

But that place is now overgrown

with a jungle’s blue-green fingers.

A girl once hunted there,

her urchin-dark eyes searching.

Rats have taken her place.

A feral dog once leapt against a spiked fence

to steal a yellow bird from your hands.

A man once told you

the species you see are not endemic

and so your ancestors never knew them,

never thatched their roofs

with that kind of plant.

But your tía still believes

in their magic: she is tall

because the blood heaving inside her is violent.

Your grandmother, whenever she held me,

ella sabía que yo era una diabla.

You are small because you are meek.

She knows you shrink

from a man’s spitting mouth

because you fear the animal

you can become at wil

Self Portrait as Graffitied Woman on a Wynwood Wall

if you carved me out & set me adrift

on this slab of debris I’d either float

from port to port or sink & become

a mermaid’s algaed artwork—-

I’ve got coins of black gum

at my feet from people who

3 say

I’m a work of art but leave pieces of their bodies

to fester & invade my skin

I cannot stop this—

I know someday an artist will paint

over my face with another face

I can accept 4 this

but maybe you should try

peeling back the newer one

once in a while—

feel free to judge the way my reds

bleed into my blues too violently but afterward

step to the other curb and take out

your camera: didn’t you know

anything worth admiring is best examined

from as far away as possible?

Sacrifice

We found the gull in parts: wings cut in jagged strips from the shoulders; feet curled tight, grasping at sand; head damp, the hanging tongue like the foot of a sea snail.

Maybe a shark got to it, my father told me, but we both knew the lie—we had seen birds strewn this way before.

We left the gull to the waves.

Nearby, children hid between bright yolas like beach rats running from the water’s edge.

I kept telling myself, as my father had, that

7 the bird hadn't been torn by a man, his hands precise about where he lay each piece.

La Operación

I will never know my abuela, but I know her eyes.

She dug her mother’s shoes out from graying snowbanks, pulled

that black-shawled woman from glass.

Her fingers, stained with banana leaves, blistered under hard twine.

Men lined up outside her door,

dragging hungry wives and children.

One said, ella es la reina de Harlem.

One said, she’s a beggar’s filthy palm.

She never fed them all.

They groped the doorframe and tongued the lock, but all she could say was duerme duerme duerme.

And she’d dream too, of fawns lying

by roads outside the city. That they leapt towards her, their eyes black or missing; she feared the impossible angle of their necks.

I know she woke from this dream

with a son in her arms and her womb on a table. I know she did not ask for this.

And yet: her body, with its dimpled crags, she admired. She even admired her son,

with his roped knuckles, and the daughter who was not her daughter. But the space between her belly and spine was still empty: a discarded ring.

March 1, 1954

Lolita Lebrón, Rafael Cancel Miranda, and a group of Puerto Rican Nationalists

opened fire on the House of Representatives in retaliation of the violations of civil

rights and military violence against Puerto Ricans.

I am aware of my body: its place among the men around me, the pistol’s black weight

in my pocket. We are a quiet group.

Marble bears our reflections but little else; the elected men

sit inside in wool skins, discussing international affairs.

Meanwhile, dead men lie inside

our cratered cities. My brothers carry bullet holes in their spines,

11 can no longer walk the streets of Ponce.

And here, there are the signs: NO DOGS

OR PUERTO RICANS ALLOWED.

Estamos amordazados, and my mouth

demands more room.

Before I can open the doors,

Rafael grabs my shoulder:

es tarde, está lloviendo…

We should go back, he says.

I push against the wood alone.

A furled flag is brightest against my fist.

On Visiting My Grandparents’ Unmarked Grave

Row after row, this white square gapes like others; name plates turned

scrap bronze, turned drug money.

Metal remains on few,

blank but for jewel-colored synthetic petals the wind has carried

from wealthier dead. The grass inside bears no name, is an empty

woman without a womb: hueca.

The lucky man to the right served in Korea.

Un Padre Querido, his marker tells me.

The grave to the left might well hold

13 an entire family, or no one; its square, its grass, its flat expanse is the same

as the one I stand before.

I pray for the contents of both:

the unknown, my abuela buried first, the man my father calls father.

But my words will never mark them.

Prayers draped over their graves can only be stolen by the air.

Mastectomy, or My Mother

The day your hair fell out, you fell asleep in a tub green from dyed epsom salts.

You never knew I was there—eyelids shut but moving slightly, gaze shifting in dreams.

I stayed quiet and examined your new absences.

Sunbursts of veins crossed your scalp, flaring

through thin skin and clusters of shoulder freckles.

The barbed scars bisecting your chest looked like lips, sealed with a secret or a kiss.

I realized then that you would die in this new body, stripped of what made you a woman and a mother. I am ashamed of how long I stared.

In a photo I found of you honeymooning, you stood in a hotel doorway, wearing a pale peignoir, dark curls framing a smirk.

I imagined my father putting down the camera

15 and meeting you where you stood, reaching in, unfastening the silk to consider the lines of your skin.

Stargazing With My Father

I saw you old and failing that clear night.

Charting the stars between your fingertips, you tried to name your favorite constellations but something blocked the path from sight to mind to forming words—you said the wrong names every time.

Walking along the town’s one road, we passed a graveyard. I’d be lonely, buried here,

I said. Alive with fireflies and starlight, the tiny plot was still a run-down scene: ashen grass climbing ashen crosses, leaning, the cracked concrete of caskets peeking through the dirt. The nearby creek was silent, choked with forgotten laundry and mismatched shoes.

Your face seemed ancient then, pitted, blue.

I hope I’m buried here, you said. It’s lonely.

Beside the Abuelo’s Deathbed

Eyes frantic with ghosts, you see long-buried friends you once fished with before the sun could run its fingers through the sea.

I remember the day you mended snags in your hand-woven cast net.

Sitting on a palm stump, you told me a man must beware toothed rocks that trap

the strands, letting live bait go free.

Mira, nena, aquí está el problema.

The threads were distended and yawning; your notched fingertips pulled them just so,

making tessellated diamonds once more.

That night, you let me crush the burrows of the land crabs we boiled for dinner.

After feasting on coconut, their flesh

was finally sweet and firm.

No te preocupas, mi amor, you said while I wept for the red legs thrashing from under the pot’s lid.

¡Vamos a comer como reyes!

Elegy for the Music Teacher

For Laurel

I still sit at the piano to assume the posture you pressed into the small of my back.

I loved to watch you twirl

Parliaments between fingers, their lightness: the bones of a songbird.

I often think of those thousands of cigarettes nestled in the crystal oarlocks of your ashtray.

I remember your red rocker,

your viola’s snarling lion scroll.

I never learned Arabesque, preferring to watch you play instead. I quit at sixteen.

Your den, the concert hall, became yellower and yellower; I imagine you’re still reclining

like a crumpled tigress, solving crosswords and tapping in time to Dvořák.

Veteran

A friend once asked my father did you kill anyone in Vietnam?

as if those were words he heard enough to be accustomed.

Going through his boxes of slides,

I held each square to the light:

children squatting in a village square eating skewered white meat;

the reticulated python he’d caught and kept in a wooden crate,

feeding it cat-sized rats who were constricted before they hit the floor;

22 a topless woman mid-sway before a group of soldiers.

My mother bakes pies on Veteran’s Day.

I’ve traced names on the memorial,

have wondered which he knew.

That is a question I will not answer.

He only ever told me about the snake.

Epithalamium

A Mourning Dove rattles her throat before the day’s first call.

Early sun licks the lake’s surface with white.

The whisper of finer fabrics. The whisper

of opening blooms revealing what insects live inside.

Sloped cypress lets us pretend we gather in a wood

rather than a chapel.

Every woman’s heels will sink into soft earth.

It will be too late to clean them for the photographs.

The dove refuses to stay and listen. She has a nest to assemble.

The lake is a white marble hall. No pealing bells.

Let us stand together. Let us sit, or pray.

Let gold change hands.

I Dream of My Future Child

& he is a tiny thing.

His long hair sticks to his head like a black, unpeeled onion.

I try holding him to my breast but he squirms.

He has three eyes; they blink

in succession, pupils contracting without reason.

My mother and father coo

at his side, tell me you’re lucky, he’s beautiful.

I want to spit in their faces.

I remind myself he is a newborn boy & not

26 an animal. The eye

in his forehead closes in agreement. He kisses his palm, presses it between my eyes

& says, I know you did not want a son.

In Which the Lover Watched As

I cracked open my chest—

my ribs, a crane in flight.

What spattered painted a gaping

O, a circle so large we could dance

in it. After that first rupture,

nothing was left but my spine

(a flickering neon sign) & some skin, or:

what held me together. Not everything

was bright or violet-red. There was blackness

too, but what was dark I cannot name.

My belly remained intact. Lucky you—

your favorite part.

I Dreamed in Spanish Once

In the noonday sun, bats circled la Giralda.

The pulse

of their slow-beating wings shivered down

the carved vaults.

Your long hair shined, dark:

I heard Andalusians would look

like you.

I touched your hair & rivers broke off in my fingers, flooding

the tile.

We stood alone in the cathedral as skeletons shifted

30 beneath us:

Columbus & his son

& Fernando & Alfonso

prayed aloud

to be unlocked, to stand, to taste just a taste of wine,

to see the sun.

I understood their pleas, the por favores, the podrías.

Mendigos, I thought.

Seahorse Polyamory

I’ve heard it takes days: that twisting grip, unavoidable

drift,

the shifting colors of this predawn dance like a gem’s

face.

We know what comes next.

She aligns her spiny mermaid

form

to his—hers, the more lithe.

Almost swollen, his belly

maw

now begs to receive. He becomes a milky cavern. He becomes her

morning

hello. But at season’s end, she might find herself gazing upon some

lady,

unripe and hard. No such pouch.

And when their tails intertwine,

she

might have no thought for her brood, needing instead to graze her gap against

a likeness.

Lake Alice on a Sunday Morning

Do you take this man?

Alligators speak in a guttural language—

their songs advertise impressive erections.

My dress is white, its hem already dirty,

and my ring isn't quite slipping over the joint.

I push it past, kiss the reddening skin.

I can’t help but sway

34 to the lizard tune,

think this is the sound

I’ve been looking for.

Underneath my dress is a horrid, itchy slip:

mesh made of Spanish moss, wet and slick.

In sickness and in health?

Dammit, Father,

I’m more than ready.

I take it. I take this man.

Cat After Labor

We prepared the bed with your oldest towels, made the warmest nest. She seems not to care.

Curved away from her new-delivered kits, she lies panting, ataxic tail dancing.

She doesn’t clean her offspring.

Perhaps her frame is too slight to have borne six, but what else could she have done?

Like angioedema, estrus left her swollen, howling; now her slick kittens are stillborn in piss.

Despite exposure to oxygen and light, their mouths remain resolutely shut, legs impossibly outstretched.

Yet she’ll steal outside again soon, demanding an open window, demanding the most of every male she meets.

She will always bow to female duty.

New York Sonnet

One of my fathers played stickball in Harlem.

This one never got a street-kid nickname.

Another scared well-dressed ladies into crossing the street before he crossed their paths.

I’m told it was his boots or his brown skin.

A different father found friends stair-slackened: addicts a boy couldn’t turn his gaze from.

One found god and never loved anyone.

Another played a dented sax, its keys rusted pearly green underneath the pads.

#6 had his name called to enlist— he didn’t like that one bit. Another kept a baby boy in tow. My favorite stood before the wild and never came back.

Daughters I Haven’t Met

Heaven is a river

filled with flat stones, girls lining the bank,

skipping rocks.

As I pass each one

& touch her curls,

I see her future

unfurled in my palm:

first kiss, missing breasts,

whiskey breath.

Sons. Some have none.

They’ve all got my June-dark skin

& mouths that can’t quite close.

One girl catches

38 sight of her fate,

steps further into the white water,

& begs me to hold her under. Please, she says.

Don’t let me be born.

I Pay the Girl

on my lap a twenty, fold it into her waist.

She winks, calls me honey.

In the corner, there is a man and a woman lying on the man like a skinned rabbit. A silken

animal barely writhing to the song.

I cannot see her face, only loose rings of hair, a slick back,

the bright soles of her feet.

I think of his wife undressing for bed, wondering where he is.

Or perhaps he has no wife, and will unlock his front door

40 to find a darker room.

His girl presses and presses against him with no urgency: this man has come before,

will be here long after I’m gone.

I call over the nearest girl, her faux fur boots shining.

I press a dollar into her breasts as she beckons me forward, tells me they’re real.

Harlot, Strangler After Sada Abe

He touches my spine my legs clench say yes open one hand in my mouth the other untying knots

I will tie down his white neck

ii.

He asks me to press my knees to his throat I do my belly becomes an offering for his mouth his face a twisted red mask

42 iii.

Once he sleeps I’ll steal his genitals to carry in my back pocket they will keep stay pink and firm

I will bury them in spring

Honeymoon

I half-filled

a goblet with spring water

& placed it in the cavity between

our halves of the bed we never spoke about it

our cold new bedmate

after some weeks

the silver tarnished life congealed inside

the water turned fen-like evaporation left timestamps

a diving bell spider made her home

feasting on fairy shrimp & larvae

she not only ate them

44 but her own eggs afterward

when she died her exoskeleton

grew brown algae & sank when we were still newly wed

the stagnant cup leaked black onto our sheets & I

poured the pond out

Blood Sport

You once asked if I could

tie down my feet.

You once asked to paint in red along my ribcage,

preferring to adorn

yourself with gold thread and small mirrors—

you would caress my temples,

begging to peel back that skin, to find what’s written there

& I let you.

I was virginal & starving.

I admired that nakedness,

lying on the hardwood, slack & heavy.

You once asked what kind of animal I am.

I thought I was a woman

but I am a bull

snorting in the dust,

pulsing beneath your hands

as you feel for the soft spot between my shoulder blades.

Baby Fever

I could be a mother, a leaking woman.

I could sing off-key to a son, swaddle him in the softest fleece. I could protect the world and buy cloth diapers. I have thought these things through. I could start by feeling my cervix, taking my temperature, telling my husband

Let’s make a baby. Now.

I could become a nesting woman; neutral color palettes would excite me. Or I’d paint my son’s room pink to fuck with people. I cannot help but think about after; the lies he’ll tell me about the girls

48 or boys he takes to his room, about the ones he stalks toward in the dark.

I can never say boys will be boys.

He will terrify me; my womb is a snowed-in door.

Poem for the Girl Who Loves Girls

No empty merry-go-rounds.

No visible scars through the holes in your jeans.

No trading painkillers on the swings.

No signatures on your pink and green Chucks.

No after-sex cigarettes,

no we should be in a movie speech.

Don’t steal her dad’s car.

Don’t shave her in the shower or take pictures of her Barbasol bikini.

No pretend threesomes.

Nobody will ever know about us, a secret.

No holding a baby finch in your hand, small as a raisin. No tossing the ones that don’t make it into the trash.

No seeing her in the blossoming orange trees, in cracked sea glass.

No dreaming. No, you can’t dream yet.

Ode to My Womb

Dear unstocked refrigerator, you decide on curtain patterns: damask/velvet, maroon/floral.

You were the first interior decorator,

& how could you be anything but a woman peering out at me through what blooms in my underwear?

I hate you at your emptiest.

Oh little fist, you wait between two poisons, either to swell or wrinkle— shrill pain squeezing around the breath I can’t catch.

Dear woman crossing her legs in an airport terminal: who, but you, starts a war?

What kind of artist

51 can you call yourself until—

The only time I’ll meet you is through sound, a topographical map, black & white even when you’re cherry-red.

I was still a child when I learned

I could bleed from no wound.

My sisters knew then: be careful with boys—the hunt is on.

So send me your pearls, wrap them in scarlet shrouds,

& I will bury them out back. Send them

& I will offer you my lovers.

I have nothing else to give.

Ouroboros

The smallest infinity: this morning.

The weak sun has exposed us.

A seatbelt digs into my skull as I try to lie draped

like a jaguar skin, impossible in this small coupe’s backseat.

How did we get here?

I hunted you.

We are drunk with fatigue, insatiable. We dilate.

This is our version of eternal, forgetting

53 the parts of one another that will rot when we pull apart.

You taste like malt liquor. Even as I am devoured, I sharpen my teeth

to open you.

Apophenia

I once tried to read the palm of a man I did not know. His fingers were long and could not stay face up; he reached for my breast instead. I felt no warmth in his hand, in my chest.

All we left was an indentation on the couch, its loose cover twisting like a woman’s white veil.

I was taught to never look a man in the mouth; rather, I have learned to demand his family secrets. I am old enough to know what these mean, that I can use them to build a shrine. His father’s mistress had long black curls. No words exist for his mother’s lovers.

Black underwear makes a constellation around my ankles. Capricornus, perhaps. Backlit by the television, he tells me I resemble a woman. He resembles something else. I run my tongue over the flattest parts of his teeth.

I can feel where he’s begun to grow antlers.

We watch one another as if the moon does not exist, as if there is body of water between us. I see a man at the bottom of this lake. He sees a doe instead.

He preferred bruised fruit to anything.

I want to catch my ankle in the spokes of his bicycle. My mother has a scar there too; its silver shines like a polished bone. She told me how it felt to fall forward, her talus flashing in the sun. I find this romantic. I would reach for his hand and kneel and lick the blood from my own leg.

We played by laying coins on each other’s eyes. I liked him best that way, smelling of stale metal, eyelids ringed in gray. We played by hunting in the dark. He taught me to identify prints, to gut, to dress. He only smiled with his hands deep inside a warm red cut.

In the dream, he is a feral child who does not speak. When I wake, he is a shadow moving across the door. When I wake, I have no mouth to open.

Ode to Hysteria, Ode to Anhedonia

one of you is a woman with pointed teeth

I like your girlish cackle we play games in your well- furnished sitting room the whiskey wall is genius let’s have a party & invite everyone we’ve met

let’s kiss them all

but at your worst you become two women or more keys will crumble in their locks the room lit by your mouth will drop & drop double is too many sometimes

I’d rather be alone—

dearest other girl waist-deep in water

I hate you why did you flood the bedroom though maybe it was always flooded please don’t stare at your feet

they’re bone

but at your best let’s sleep together since my legs are your legs

& your hands are my almost-twins sometimes I crave your mouth more

than my own--

together you peer at the stars

& decide I’m your best prey

I ask you both again

& again

why don’t you just

drown each other

The Hole in My Side Was Nothing Like Christ’s

I lifted up my shirt & said:

Here, touch it, put your mouth on it, drain me.

Climb into my lance-wound.

It’s got your name on it.

& what came out was not blood: it was the cry of a canine or a baby, of whatever howls in the night.

What came out was not blood-red but the tawny light of a late moon.

I hate it, you told me,

shutting your eyes,

covering your ears to block

the sound rushing from the gash under my ribcage.

I never wanted to know your animal.

But I knew yours, with your teeth gleaming quick in the dark & hot breath splitting that hole even wider.

It grew loud, loud:

my wound had no words,

my wound was a mirror.

I see it now, you said, peering in.

I am your wolf, & you are my wolf.

Outside the Psychiatric Hospital

We are on a break from group; the two men smoke Camels & I need some air. We talk music.

Saw Hendrix in ’70, the oldest man says.

He lives alone with his Pomeranian

& is so optimistic in remission

I do not know why he’s here.

The HVAC guy tells us about his garage band: a good

hobby to have. But this is small talk. Back inside, he will insist

I should be happy.

But I am the weakest man I know.

Then: I think I was raped as a boy.

It will be the first time I see

a grown man cry, besides my father.

The room will shift its weight, cross and uncross its legs.

Some people carry a hole the size of a childhood.

I’m still uncertain I do.

But on this cigarette break, before we hear him name that trauma, he touches my shoulder

& says, I used to write poetry too.

We got that in common.

I tell him, I bet it was beautiful.

On the Duality Of

This is two rooms on opposite sides of a house.

These rooms are made for me.

One is covered in ivy: my new backbone.

One is so empty it sighs.

This is the shakes, or the white sheet I examine for blood spots.

I am coated in nothing, forever a woman crawling. This is

my shaking: yes. Or, this is a shaking: I need.

I cannot help but see a rift

between ridged fingertips and how soft a woman can be. How she is

65 always a curve I can never reconcile, but I still smell her. Hello,

heart-racer. Hello, rethinker. Every flower that’s red or white

dies as quickly as it can in my vase.

They beg for light even

as I am compelled to crush each dried petal in my fist.

Nude Beach

Watching my clothes wrinkle on sand makes me feel more naked than my nakedness.

We swim in the Mediterranean while our stretch marks and dark areolae marry the sun. One girl says

I think we’re more likely to get breast cancer now, even if we use sunscreen.

She punches out the lenses of her sunglasses, rests them on each nipple for protection.

Saltwater dries in bright crystals; our bodies grow decadent and loud.

We’ve been told this is the best beach, pretend we’re local. We don’t talk about the leather-breasted woman, whether our future children will rob us.

We don’t stare at men

67 whose patchy hair loss has traveled down, whose saphenous scars split their limbs like lightning-struck trees.

We won’t even watch the girls our age who play volleyball, sand burns flaring on their curves. We go quiet and try to lie flat, hoping the sun will erase what’s left of our lines.

Bipolar and its Related Disorders

“Do you wish to disclose any disabilities?”

II is my box—I lie in it ten years too late.

I prefer not to answer but at a party, you tell a girl about

your new milligrams and she says me too. And suddenly, all you want

is to graze your thumb across her waist or lip, but both your lovers

watch from a backlit doorway.

Then you can mentally

make a tick: risky sexual behavior,

69 self-destructive tendencies,

barreling toward a mixed state.

She’s a gemini too.

I’ll spend my life searching for her kind of likeness, to put

my palm against that mirror and chant with my reflection: me too me too me too.

Changeling After Ovid

Of woman’s

body and woman’s words

I tell.

ii. by beast she was born, by beast she learned to weave out poetry from her fingertips. mother showed how to give voice to steam rising from a fresh carcass, taught her seven words for root. the girl wove and wove—her fingers sang like seashells—until the forest hung with her words like dew from a spider’s leg. and the man found her language, grabbed her weavings from a willow branch and wanted more. he hunted, watching how she draped each tapestry from the trees. he smelled her ridges, could not get enough. he waited; she danced in a clearing. her words twirled around her crown and he stole her, kept her dancing underground. threads became shackles.

71 iii.

As night turned night and day turned white-

crested wave, she discovered

weaving meant more

than words. She wove silken cursive cocoon. One dusk,

she leapt out, gray pelt

bristling at the man’s voice.

She cleaned sea-foam from her feet. Her teeth

were sharp; he whimpered.

She did not care for his warm throat.

Aguadilla August 2015

Only men sit at the fountain, eyeing my sister’s legs & my exposed neck from across the square. Women on the doorstep of the ferretería ask for money, spit gringas at our backs when we clench our teeth & do not comply.

A shaded couple trades a stamp of heroin for money—an exchange, palm against palm, that ends as quickly as it begins: a shy kiss, an oar dipping into water.

There are no children here.

We were children here once.

We still photograph the ocean sunset and pocket the brightest intact shells, as if this is the place we remember.

Streets are now lined with empty homes; every ceiling, caved & rotting, is webbed with nests & vines.

The sea will make her way inside.

That Which I Consider Untamable

There is an animal behind my house. I can smell him from my bedroom. At night, he pries at the cellar, claws shapes into trees with scores so deep they pulse. An X, an eye.

Mornings, there are birds in neat rows on my doorstep. Starlings, meadowlarks: each breast splayed open like a gentleman’s waiting hand. I can only imagine his mouth, that primitive hole, lined in feathers as if Hope were a word he could craft. I see him now at the bottom of my stairs, spine low, darkness slinking closer. I light more lanterns. I caught him once, coming away with only a fistful of black and silver fur. Though I keep this tuft in a jewelry box, it is not enough. I would like his entire pelt. I would like to lie in it.

Miami Mythos

At first, we had the fire. It lived in alleys, at the fringes of sand, just beyond caged porches. I took no notice in daylight. But at night, we took to the streets. At night, we danced closest to the flames. Slick-dark heat took our rún rún rún tún tún and turned us into beasts. Pa rara ta ta—Ba rara tra tra. Some of us grew fangs or talons, but the men received shedding red antlers. We’d lick each other’s dancing feet, chew the bodies within reach. We would shake. Each paso y menea was a prayer to ourselves, this culto de zudor, el kulto de fwego. In this bacchanal, we forgot our decaying homes and the choking flora bursting from their broken pearl-pink walls. Ocean would bring final ruin.

And suddenly we were quenched.

She swept in. No heat once she’d run her palms across every stray stone.

I could only see women at my sides: the curvatures of their necks, their own fluidity

illuminated from underneath. Our land, hueca to llena in one swift stroke. I knew then we must

always live in that crepuscular blue-glow— there could be no more night for the sake

of our new bodies.

we shed our fangs and bored into them to make jewelry

my favorites were bright sharp earrings

we left the antlers to be polished by waves

our legs grew strong from wading waist-deep in that mirror

fish wove around our ankles like sheets after a nightmare

we rebuilt using jagged concrete pieces the shelters pinked with their old skins

77 we sang o mah de oma de ommadre not a single one of us was pregnant

we performed one another’s dentistry molars pulled from flesh like peach pits

we were acutely aware of our absences of which ones ached or rotted red

yet when the moon stood overhead we openly bled

The Avenue

My house is breaking slowly: tub with hairline cracks pointing to where the floorboards meet their deepest point; some doors cannot close anymore.

In dreams, I see the ghosts of those who lived here: faded women bathe by moonlight; men rattle their teeth.

I’ve strewn my books in every corner in an attempt to warm my space.

I clutch my knees and sway to sirens during the darkest part of storms;

I make love and the bed slumps into floor grooves made by other bed frames.

Through the windows of more sinking homes,

I watch the neighbors silhouetted:

79 a toddler twists her mother’s ears; the aging couple prays, hands clasped.

Across the street, a woman sings hot afternoons to withered daisies and leaves out food for feral cats.

They’ve made a home under my home— their heat-cries echo through the floor.

They are the wildest things I see.

Things to Do in the Belly of a Whale

It’s been three nights, so cloak yourself in his innards and wait for food to rush in.

Scoop handfuls of writhing pink krill.

Brush your hair and teeth against his baleen.

Tap in time to his circulatory system— dance and pound your feet to its rhythm.

Do not think about your loved ones.

They will believe you drowned.

Sometimes, you will feel like drowning, but remember: what is more pitiful than the attempt to rise?

Mark your days with something sharp against his purpling walls even when he shudders at this marring.

Cover your ears when he cries his silver love song come winter.

Don’t let it remind you of your child

81 who still walks from room to dark room, calling out for no one in particular.

Huracán

My chicken tilted her head:

the rain is coming

wind will reach down

and pluck you where you stand—

She made for the storm cellar.

I lived underground a week after watching a dog take one of her children from beneath a banana leaf; the chick’s white neck lolled between his jaws.

The storm did not end.

I drank drops that sprang from the ceiling; I ate fistfuls of dirt. When the sun finally cracked the earth, I emerged as the bird came back to my door:

83 this island will swallow you listen to the worms in these walls—