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Jeffrey C. Alfier
Homophobia
many stand against us
for possessing bodies
where the seed dreams inward,
and the tongue seeks countries
their lap-dancers don't sell
and their wives never stay...
Young Wives
Then, sending you to market,
she expects you to elide
coasts of pheromones, as if
napes were pirates, and hair sharks.
Spontaneous Orgasm
Her spine electrified
Without touch,
Seared by the scent
Of bare skin
Adrift
Annette Hope Billings
Make Me
Make me linger on satisfaction's doorstep
and straddle the line between not quite and there.
Make my need approach delirium.
Cheryl Dunbar
Mi Flor
Quien estropeo tus petalos
Una caricia te irrita
Dulce palabras te estrangulan
Con lagrimas fertilizo tu tierra seca
Richard Furman
Mummies
Mummy skull bottle openers,
a mug that reads: I am dying for a drink and a woman.
fetus skull t-shirt, the name of the town underneath.
What of the souls of the dead, we ask.
What do we care of souls, they laugh hard,
what good are souls when it is food and drink we need?
Leticia Hernandez-Linares
La Pelona Blues: Hairless, Frida Kahlo's Idea of Death, Unfeminine, Bald Bald Bald
. . . ahora que estás pelona ya no te quiero
this tickle that haunts you will make you wonder
if it's my braids wrapped around your heart
if it's my betrayed locks teasing the skin behind your arms
as you wait I weave
my song
our daughters grow their hair in remembrance
immigrating, laboring, our sons' hair was cut
our daughters grow their hair in remembrance
educated, incarcerated, our sons' hair was cut
alejandara ibarra
dime
tell me
dime
if i come
how high will you fly for me
liquid
he's the fuckin' liquid i breathe
said a man about his friend
who he lusts for as a lover
santa perversa
a prayer
chanting through her inner thoughts
Santa Perversa
dános hoy tus dones de mujer
libéranos de malos amores
pero déjanos noches
de insaciables
suspiros
extasiosos
Canéla Analucinda Jaramillo
Not a Prayer
We wanted a prayer of success, or succession, between us - but one thing following another, we were led astray. I wonder what you look like without your insolent pride. I would suck the tip of your disaster, while the horses scuffed against the rails. Let's go talk about that.
Communion Fragments
Confession: progress is nearly imperceptible, despite my wars. I am an inconvenient daughter, progeny of cruel kings. In my arrogance, I have taken the names of good lords in vain. I do not know whether I have ever honored my father or my mother. I suspect myself of many things.
Sheryl Luna
Smokin'
she ran in a blue-gold
singlet, barefoot and thin. Her gait like a woman
ball player before her time, a dancer on Broadway,
there in a Texas barrio. Mary Jane loved her name
as she toked, thin fingers sexy, and she left one day
Olympic bronze, athletic want.
Wasteland
dollars, bills painted green, as if we could buy back earth.
After the Rockies, hardness, the land is flat mile upon mile;
coyotes kill, men drill. In Marfa there are strange alien lights.
Oil wells pump West Texas dry. Sandstorms like an omen.
Tigua casinos now closed. The Aqueducts well owned.
The screen door bangs, The hawk an animal totem.
Raze
Believing we'll find happiness in children
and debts, we buy, consume. We sing hoarsely
for pools, for boats, our eyes full of haste. Weary
at night we fall into soft mattresses and dream. Elite
and golden on trips to Bombay purchasing beads,
rugs, speaking of karma, planning a profit on resale.
Talk of Ghandi, though we've never endured. A day
of clouds and thick darkness. A fire consumes us. Pale
America, like a mighty people arranged for battle.
Full Flair
Thorna ran out into the street in underwear;
it was dark that night and she careless
and swept away with her own words and drink
sang a song about law school and how she
was not white. The neighbors flicked on lights
and soon the police arrived. Once a black girl
screamed and was shoved into a white truck.
Larry called the cops and they never came.
And I was searching for something of words
falling from the open sky like snow flakes,
and how to know life was measured in fake
fawning?
EA Lynch
Deluge
And so you cry out, waiting
for proof
or substance,
an echo, a dead stop. Here is
boats' bottom, the boundary, the end.
And so you cry out, "The glass must be empty."
This particular vacancy exquisite labyrinth,
patient mandala of season.
December, 2001
Shadows seem longer this year,
sun barely grazing the shoulder of the planet.
Like a bullet.
Or a hurried kiss on the way to work.
Or an arrow pointed at an apple
atop our heads.
We buy groceries,
hang pink carnations on the
Christmas tree.
Esteban Martinez
Rappin' to Neruda 'bout the Other Night
and i
instead
with my coarse alcoholic self
said i dig you
really dig you
and dug into her
between the red sand of her thighs
with no regard for the sanctity of her calm
Bourbon
where I take another drink
where I try my damndest not to think
that I left God's white silk and incense
seeking a mirage
a better version of you
Mary K. Mega
2 Sun 7
Shake the receptors from influence
like the wind-blown branch tries...
Hurled air begs on the sanction of our architecture,
reaps the passages like a vacuum
& cleans the streets, bogged-free.
Christina Ranon
Foster Children
You say honey we need sugar love
but I want something bloody and moving in my mouth,
something beating my throat, wet stain
over my ribs, with the heart pounding under.
Proxy
We can never live long enough
to smooth away the scars; there are soft places in us always,
purple with lost silence, vocal folds scraped away,
black stones falling in a tangled sea of pale voices.
Jim Davis Rosenthal
Book of Life
a scribe filling pages with ink from the deep sea, papyrus paper, a table with a candle lit, spilling wax to its wooden planks.
and firemen they rush into buildings covered gray with chalky soot like moon rocks like rocks falling everything falling
or everything pushed,
or lost, stolen.
Eschatologies
it's all the still lifes, not just the Cezannes
and van Kessels, but all of them, lined up
in a stack, but not one waiting for another, no waiting,
there's really no longing,
just a frieze, or a stage picture that
even celluloid couldn't capture, being too thick.
and there you are suspended, and so is the ball, and
both hanging in the air. it always has been this way
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