Alexa Lemoine

At some point
I had a swollen muscle
)or a body
that pretended to be
one swollen muscle)
Loaned to me by a tuft of sugar cane
I don’t know how to hold sweetness
or vastness the right way
Like a poacher caressing dirt
before cutting for some long absent bone
What I’ve been able to hold has long
been lost in a hole of the white
porcelain of one whole universe’s heirlooms
Cartography is just the
impulse to jump
off of things
The righteous have since discovered
a black hole with its maw wide open
Who can compete
with that kind of devotion?
I certainly can’t
My stomach
Won’t hold any more of
The universe’s ash
I’ll cough it up in the yard
Next to the ire and the musk
and the citrus tree
While the man across the street
gives audience with pillaging eyes
At my wither
at my pinked failure
Who will hold my hair
when that love escapes
my mothering tendon
Who will hold me through
All my wretched

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i only ever promised to lay there

           brown babies

under the mosquito net

kept squealing until i

quiet as a bird could sleeping with a god

pulled up my socks for them

over her head all proud & puffed up but

all the way to my knees

i made such a mess in the bed

y volví a casa

had to get out of the muck

without any boots or silver or romance

asquerosa

untouched by anything but dirty asphalt

i’d guzzled the mango nectar

i wanted for someone to douse me

in the fridge without permission

in my island’s holiest water

unlocked the bolts of my need

to make me grown

como un tamborito, piel abierto

tell me a thing or two

tell me,

about what it feels like to eat yourself up

if the bachatero doesn’t

wailing in sing song &

roll the güiro down the alley

as ripe as the sorrow

all night did he ask for enough

underneath my pillow

forgiveness? if i walked out into the

i put my hands to work &

street wearing my childsclothes would

hid my girlcharms

someone write a song about me

my stink of youth that

as if i were a woman? my stomach

offends the god, chokes the bird,

went tiktikatik & i became a grand band;

tucks me in, & i can tell you it sings

the men in their wifebeaters & the dogs &

it sings my need like a fable, like a howl

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