TNM Featured Poet
@l.rodri.writes
leorodriguezwrites.com
CW: Sexually-explicit language, violent imagery,
and references to suicidal ideation.
Because we did not die
I fold my arms across my lover’s
hard-won breasts, sink
my weight onto one thigh gripped
tight between
hers, our naked skin luminescing
in the dim twilight of our new apartment.
Reach across time, I’ll tell you
we did not die.
Fuck it.
I love ugly T-boys.
I love our patchy beards and patchy hairlines.
Our dad bellies, our teenage breakouts.
I love our heavy, saggy tits,
and our clock-round hips that strain our Levi’s–
Levi’s with cuffs rolled up and up and up.
I love the thick leather shimmer of our dog-eared scars.
Our hairy assholes and our clit-dicks of every size.
And when my mother moans that I’ve ruined my voice,
I will scream-sing my anthem louder,
squawking on every high note.
I am always forgetting
that in spite of everything,
the world is good
at heart, a wounded child
only. I am continually learning
these things and forgetting again, which
is perhaps not as damning
as I always thought it was. Maybe
we are meant to forget it and remember it
again and again, blessed
by the world to discover
her goodness
for the first time so many times.
Assata Said
It is our duty to fight for our freedom.
It is our duty to win.
And we clenched our fists around that, and
we made our minds into bear traps and
we made our hands into rifles and
we spat bullets engraved minutely
with essays on the death of the world,
and we aimed for each other’s eyes.
We closed rank, we trimmed the rot
as well as the flowers, we wrestled the word I
out of each other until all we could see
were operatives and agents.
We each stood in a salted field, hemorrhaging utopias.
Maybe we didn’t want freedom so much as
we just wanted to die.
We must love each other and support each other.
Like the singed-off end of a heretic’s prayer
from a time before creeds.
If we raze the old world to the roots,
and sow the field with barren branches
in perfectly-ordered ruts in the shrapnel dust,
Do you think our ancestors will thank us?
Don’t you know while one finger
pulls a trigger, the other hand holds
what preciousness the trigger protects?
I love you, I want us to live
in this tattered century,
in this fugly rotten circus of a country, where still
there is the miracle of a meal with a friend,
of listening to the rain patter above your love-bed.
I want us to spin out justice from our hands
like a thick and greening vine drops fruit–
effortlessly, out of our sweetness,
without coaxing or coercing the seeds.
I want us to choose each other
over platforms and party lines and pamphlets,
again and again and again.
We have nothing to lose but our chains.
RRCC 