arnoldo garcía: soledades

I cannot possess you
anymore than you can possess
the wind, the water, the land
And I will never possess you or the land
Yet all I want is to be buried in you
So that you can possess me
Turning me into
a flurry of wind
dust across your watery back
a muddy caress of your feet...

Golondrinagrafía * 2 de mayo | may 2 | *

La golondrina bebe
las lágrimas de la mujer herida
La curandera la piensa,
la sueña,
la frota de plantitas y oraciones, llantos y colores
Ella ahoga su plumaje
en la menstruación inalámbrica
de la ternura

Su cuerpo bramido
parte soles
para destruir a los soldados
que hicieron guerras contra su horizonte

Golondrina labios acurrucados
vuela a los míos
Tu boca sobre la mia, golondrina
Tus labios, golondrina,
desdoblandose sobre los míos
Se mezclan, se entretejen y haces el nido de nuestra salvación

Golondrina ya bebe de mis lágrimas
Para qué ella descanse
en tu vuelo
sobre tu espalda negrita …

I am closing in | Day 10 & 11 | poetry month

I am closer to life than to death
I am closer to tenderness than to hate
I am closer to breath than to silence
Every day becomes an answer to taking sides
Every night I ingest the suns that will never be ours

I am closer to horizons than to forgetfulness
I am closer to the next woman than to his oblivion
In five years or five lifetimes

I would never change the molecular structure of my bed
I would dream with the same woman
whose tears have become tiny gashes on the wrists of hurricanes

I am closer to the wind than to the smokestack
I am closer to the dust than to the rails of capital exploitations
I am closing in on the predator that has made our skin impossible

I am closer to you than to my mortality
I am closer to your suffering than my own
My senses are craters on your body
My body sister to your menstruating lands



















I am closer to her water than to the desert
I am closer to her light than to the sorrow.
She revives the sun, gifts it to heal the first wound.
Her body becomes the next sun,
the next beginning,
the first kiss of humanity.

***

He believes the woman that wants to destroy him
She doubts the man that loves him

She is life under siege
She is resisting, her eyes cry knives:
An eye for an eye to blind the monster
An eye for an eye to love blindly

I am closer to power because I am with her
I am closer to the moaning ocean wave because I hear her
I am closer to the ripening sky because of her skin of clouds
I am closer to the sun because I walk alongside her
Now, I am closer to being human than to being forgotten

***

Migrant ghost heart | day eight poetry month

She is now just an idea,
a deep memory
an ancestor
a sister
a woman
a ghost heart
in my mind in my veins in my half life

Her body was her own utopia
she gave herself over to one man only
gave birth to sons
who married and had daughters and one son
who she then raised
because her sons became trapped in the delirium of their bodies
-- and nothing else.

Her body was overthrown
by an uprising of cells
brigades and divisions
armies invading overrunning her body
all organized by her beautiful blackened curly hair
the uprising occupied her adulthood
burned her body into all her sisterhoods
occupied her five senses
punctured her voice into silent curses
deep pain, nails under the eyeballs, skinned alive pain
The onslaught of cellular troops
forced her to retreat to childhood
where her father and mother
where her sisters and brothers
waited for her
they were the fortress walls
of tenderness
of sweets and toys
of being held in arms
of being breast-fed
of being rocked into cozy sleep under hand-made quilts and lullabies
where the warm breath of her mother's wisdom
pushed back the scrimmages, the ambushes and cleared the battlefields
so she could live another day to live...

She became all her sisters
Her skin an impeccable wave
her lips a crimson dance
Her bones turned into glass
She became the young woman again
Until she became the girl of her own utopia.

She would laugh at our jokes because it made her happy
She would cook all the meals and served coffee because she knew hunger
She attended to herself with the love she made
because she knew what being loved did for her
She offered herself without conditions...

This music
she hums and sits upright
even though her bones
have lacerated her flesh,
gnawing away her laughter
the shards of her bones
skinning her eyes with barbed-wired tears
Her body an incision of endless weight
splitting apart the atomic meditation
of the pain-killers
into particles of song
pushing her down into a bayonet of solitude
shattering the vertebrae of her embrace

She did not want to leave alone
She refused.
The invading armies shriveled
Our mourning became her ally
She would not leave alone.
So her father came for her
brought her a girly dress that she adored
And then she left with resolve and unfinished love...

If I were human | day one poetry month

If I were human
I would be a woman
Whose fists would be tenderness filled with thorns.
I would worry about nothing except my daughters

I would love freely
The man who would make me laugh at philosophy
The man who would not hurt ants or my tears.

If I were human
I wouldn't fear unemployment
I wouldn't fear the distance that keeps me from her
I wouldn't fear anything except not being able to love
in the rain of winters without hope

If I were human
You would be happy, more fearless than you already are
You would be able to live
where the sun sets & rises without losing your place.

You would say:
Your wrinkled skin,
your battered lungs do not matter
Only that your heart pounds in my hands
Only that your smile is a machete to wield against my darkness
That your scars are the DNA of my pleasure

If I were human
Utopia would be now
Wherever we go,
wherever we are...