easy to wish for: smaller base, taller body.
we risk a few things in this way of living,
like collapse, or leaving a trace.
keeping pace/performing grace/replacing
taste with empty space –
3 times each slow rotation, a practice in
discipline. then,
all over again, & again, &again.
As an infant I was raised
like a scar, red and ready
to be anyone’s
kin. Blood synonym, boy unwish. I
was born a failed son: daughter
of the hidden swelled belly, left
like shredded stretch marks
on the stomach. I wanted
to touch someone without leaving
any blurred skin behind.
My birth was an exit
I did it. I committed a felony
against an empty barn
and all the sweet oxygen
inside of it, made a pyre of the stable
and retired the silo to ash
like an old American flag. I’ve always loved
the smell of hay, newspapers, anything
with the potential to be doused in an erasure
I adore Grimes, a self-taught indie musician who I saw live before I knew who she was. I was seventeen and had bought tickets to see Lana Del Rey at Klipsch Music Center with my friend, Eric. I only bought the tickets because I knew Eric liked her. I thought he was cool, with his long hair and surprisingly expansive knowledge of pop culture, and I wanted to spend more time with him. Maybe a week before the concert, I mentioned offhandedly that Lana’s opener was a cute Canadian synth-pop artist named Grimes.
“Are you kidding? I fucking love Grimes,” Eric exclaimed with wide eyes. We were sitting in the courtyard of our old high school eating lunch. I didn’t think Eric ate enough, so I would pack extra food to give to him. I thought he was humoring me, because I never fathomed that he would know an indie Canadian artist, and I expressed so. I shouldn’t have been surprised that just because I didn’t know Grimes at the time, Eric didn’t as well. He was a collector. He had shelves filled with records, CDs, books, and DVDs. He fascinated me and he always had since we had that middle school art class together. Eric was tall and all bones. It was like somebody took a normally proportioned person and stretched him out just a little too long. He shaved his head when he was sixteen and hadn’t cut it since. His blonde and wavy hair had just reached an overgrown stage where it kissed his angular shoulders. My mother once asked me if Eric was gay because “he’s just so pretty for a boy.” The ambiguity of his sexual orientation, along with his androgyny, had only increased over the years.
My father voted for Donald Trump. He was born in Torrance, California, named Juan Luis Ramirez. His parents, migrant farm workers, left him and his siblings as wards of the state when he was three. As far as I know. Tumultuous years later, he was adopted by a white man and had his name changed to John Luis Baker. He and Mr. Baker moved to rural Ohio, and my father, I guess, stopped being Mexican. I didn’t grow up with la cultura, and neither did he, really.
