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WORK AFTER
"Always  Messing with them Boys"
Jessica Helen Lopez  

A Poem for the New World


In the land of the white cranes
skyscrapers and bank buildings
glisten like the seven cities of gold.

Bricks sweat beneath a blood-fueled
sun and the dark-skinned arms of men
are etched in glyphs. Everywhere
everybody is a sacrifice.

I am not an optimist but I pretend
to be. It gets me jobs. Secures
my place in the academe.

Mostly I scribble salt songs
on the back of napkins. Write
dissertations for the fanatics
in love with symposiums and
esoteric words.

Mostly I wish we all believed
in murder again.

This the quiet eye
of my god.

The Mexica knew the way.
Knew that dismemberment
coupled with good ol’ blood-
letting was the answer to all
things beautifully violent.

Knew that the heart was the
only organ worth wrenching.

I was born of the Seven
Great Caves. For 200 years
I went searching. Held the sun
in place with my bare hands.

The eagle clawed the nopal.
Juice spurt from the flesh.
Talon and truth.

I, the steampunk modernity
of Quetzalcoatl. All hose,
oil and piston.

No one needs to colonize me.
I colonize myself.

　

I Take My Poet Friends to (Briefly) Meet My Dad

I.

I am a master copy
cat copycat copy
so I mimicked the love
my father pretended or
thought he copied
from television an emotion
that doubled for love
and entertainment

and when we hugged beneath a bouncy
yellow sun bouncy yellow sun
bouncy was the embrace
a tasteful illusion like mimeograph
the poets looked on from
the travel car and admired how
he gave me silver cans of diet
sodas to quench my friends’ thirst

one poet even exclaimed at how
he looked so young and fit
for a man of fifty-five!

but I coulda’ told them that
looks go as far as a commercial
for toothpaste or an ad for Paxil
or a man’s cologne called Brute

and what we take for an original
facsimile always disappoints
so that sometimes the hurt almost
almost almost almost
almost mostly
feels real

II.

and so we drive away
a carload of waxy mannequins
and decide we should smoke
some grass at the park of
my childhood and feeling obtuse
and too-tight in my clothes
after a morning filled with fakery
I lie some more about the
fights I have seen or been in

all my tales are heroic accounts
of girls smashing girls’ faces
smashing girls' faces
smashing girls' faces
in the dirt right over there
by the swing set or by the
carved out maple trees near
the near-rotted picnic benches
but really the only truth I never
did tell was the time I bullied
a wiry rope of a girl and how
she looked just like me and
called a man father who looked
just like mine hollered
just like mine
prickly and certifiably insane
like mine

and how that girl died every
evening beneath a bonfire
of sightless stars, fingerless
trees and a limitless sky

right over there in the rolling
green moss that glowed like
a family secret in the childhood
of my park among the
white night moths that
fluttered and fettered until
they could fly no more
and finally fell home
to a mass grave of
tiny and individual
green sharp blades.

III.

after each nightly resurrection
the girl worked to gather herself

to heave her way home
where he waited in the
house on the cul-de-sac
(just another way to say dead end)
where the light burned in the window
blanch and white-hot
and empty-eyed
as always

　

　

Eulogy for Divorce

There were many funerals, ashes put to rest beneath the black dirt of our rose garden. There were eulogies. Sighed half-whispered incantations that hoped beyond childish hope that god loved house pets too. There was somber attire, our daughter’s coal black veil rummaged from the holiday box, the white delicate of catechism gloves, countless popsicle-stick crucifixes and satin-lined shoeboxes. There were the ghosts of dead goldfish, lost turtles, the dwarf hamster that died when it overheated atop the dryer. That shameful bullet-riddled pigeon near the dumpster ? the maimed and broken back feral cats.

But it was our family dog that we put down that splintered our little girl. Stripped something raw from her like the easy skin peeled from too-young sapling. That morning when the cold broke open, air the color of grief, our spry little terrier devoured by the tug of tires. It was not death that our daughter cried for. No, I want you to know that she cried for the living. She mourned it like a mercy killing. After the euthanasia, long after the small loan from my mother to pay for the cremation, months removed from the screech of tire, rubber and collapsed vertebrae ? dead dog, funeral, absentee father, the days we played witness to the blood spectacle of our divorce.

The litany of dead things ballooned.

Her pillow hot with the disappointment in the living. The breathing bodies that taught her more about fatalism than any young girl should know.

Death only did what death does. It was the atrophy of the living pumping red heart of her mother and the failure of her father that edged her into the golden and bitter truth. That death, that merciful scythe, is oftentimes the true blessing and that living is just the awkward phase we all grow into. That the diseased sometimes go limping along for years.

　

　

Token

Tonight we are wearing the
couch like rug burns on knees,
on back
on ass
at the nape of our neck

Tonight we are sweating
into our pillows to prove
we were there

I left behind a watermark
I left behind bite marks and a
purple star on your chest
I left behind these artifacts

With the cushion of my tongue
I trace your faded biblical ink
your skin a safe-keeping beneath
my nails ? a covenant to our lovemaking

your sternum a vastness
vessels in the neck pop
like bass strings or book binding

Where is my poem?
your eyes ask this question
baby birds batting against a birdcage
Where is our immortality?

How can I tell you without
words that you are better
than any damned thing I
could ever write?

Instead, I bleed out a confession
I am woman on top
skin on fire
I am thin and twisting inkless
A warm glass of honey writhing

You are long-legged and thunder touch
A handful of callus
Full lips the color of clay
A cool water in my mouth

Together we are
electricity’s cousin
A marquis lit up
with a string of X-Mas lights

the words flash faith
flash faith!
flash faith!

flash flood!

we are more raucous
than a tent-covered
evangelical revival

and you’ve got me
speaking in tongues

I swear this to you
on a stack of bullet-riddled bibles
I promise this to you in sweat

In the name of the Lord
and a good sweet fuck

Open the window love ?
Let the breeze and cottonwood in
Let’s make like snow in summer

I had wanted you like a mirage
and with a pant-like need
I saw you through a heat’s thirst

I wanted
you

around my neck choke chain
as fierce as a feather’s touch

a talisman
a token

tonight we are the limbs
of an exquisite corpse
stitched with a fever
as sure as any compass

open a window love ?
let the summer in
let the summer
in let the summer
in the
summer.

　

　

How I Pray in a Little Known Chapel
in Granada, Nicaragua

JThis. This ringing. The quiet
eye of my god. This gyroscope
the wheel the baton the scourge.

This whistle. This confusing
shriek. The muscle hard
a pulled saltwater taffy
skin of papaya. This skin

porous pumice map of splinters
Spindles and fingers this is this

clouds whipped to frenzy. This
electric mouth that spins the
blue-bottled blues the dizzying
cornea stems and rods.

these podium breasts
fire-engine lung
far-flung net of ignorance
across international borders

This. This secret. The quiet
descent and fascination
obtuse self-immolation

this adultery
this line
break
these brutish desires

This sucker punch rotgut need
clandestine addiction
fanciful predilections

This. This ringing. This
unspeaking gaping mouth of my god.

　

　

Or Flight

Remove your shoes and leave them by the door to his home. You will not be allowed to stay long. Tread paper thin as ghost. Watch as muscles stretch into smile. Remember not to take this act as truth. Eat only what he gives and nothing more. His food is brittle. It is Autumn’s dead leaves ? beautiful but startlingly empty of life. He will offer you a chair, a grackle, a shot of vodka. Together you will reminisce about the womb you once shared, your penchant for the drink, that one time you both rode in a limo as sleek and black as bottom feeder. The city lights had bounced and shimmered their reflection from all that tinted glass. The mirror image of your smiles almost too good to be a lie. Keep one eye on the clock, the other on the ashtray. The smoke will soon choke the room. The smoke will soon wrap clinging fingers

about your neck and rattle your carriage. The smoke will soon have its way with you. Do not forget about your shoes at the doorway. An impending getaway is close. His teeth are sloppy. His eyes too shiny. He spits more than he speaks. It is a cruelty you still marvel at to this day.

It is your father’s favorite knife handed down as heirloom. A dangerous and glittering bloodletting in your back. You are solitary witness to this disassembling. The music is banging again. It clangs its way into your ears and down your throat. A garbled elixir. He rambles on about his own desires and sycophantic

philosophies. He has shat himself again with all this righteousness. You are a livewire on the edge of your seat. The last wayward cigarette hissing in the pot. You only came to convey with your eyes that you love him. The lamp catches fire. The drapes incendiary with their madness. The television bursts into bright bubble. Shame and indignation have coupled violently. Steak knives and plates rattle from their cages. Beers burp their excuses. You will now take leave from all this mess. This sour soup. This spit and bright noise. He has stolen away to the kitchen and mixes a Molotov at the counter. It is a fiery reminder that you should leave. When his back is to you slink

away. Do not let your keys clatter your purse. Slip one then the other shoe onto exiting feet. He is mumble crazy and only two mouthfuls away from screaming the word bitch. Two shooters away from a handful of your hair. The carnage is too real. His house, an inferno. His house a tinderbox. The smoke, gutwrenchboil.

A rolling black intrusion. Leave. Leave now. Wave to him like you did when you were both children. Dandelion soft. Like a pinwheel whipping in the wind. The door knob will feel guiltily good in your palm, a smooth golden globule cool and reassuring. Close the door behind you. Softly and without anger. Pretend.

That you are not a coward. This is how you say goodbye to your brother.

　

　

Diana the Huntress

They say the number four bus enjoyed a certain reputation
its tires swaggering down a hilly road pockmarked by sage brush
loose in the axle like a man with too many beers under his belt

the fear exhaled from the women’s nostrils
fueled the trek ? a hot mist moist with the tang of terror
bus windows fogged by morning vapor
opaque and rheumy long after the women had vacated their seats

I took a pistol and placed a bullet into the bus driver’s temple
easily I deposited it there
the sun made a wistful track along the soot-covered sky
and the maquilas shut their metal doors against the day
El Paso glittered like a City of Gold from the other side of the border
a muffled silence settled into all of our bones

at the arrival of the next dawn
I took a second bullet
silver as the single bead from the rosary my mother wore around her neck
pregnant in the womb of the chamber
the bullet spat with quickfire and lodged
into the second man’s brain

again no pity, no sorrow-colored remorse
only the old number four tossed like a tin can
I walked away and did not run from the
dead man bloated and gray faced
is back and arms laced with the scarred
scratches made by the women who had not got away

The newspapers jabbered like angry bees
and the AP wire was alive with the electricity of my name

Diana the Huntress
and I fear no moon, Lady of Wild Creatures
La Cazadora worshipped by the womanly workforce
of Juarez

My sisters are frightened mares

Some might say I will perish in hell with the rest of them
the men ? adept at removing women’s faces
removing their breasts like too-soon petals
the milk of their skin, the floating flotsam
peeled beneath the killer’s knife

They like to leave behind bite marks on the buttocks
They like to leave behind dead babies cradled within eviscerated wombs

Decomposed flesh resting inside decomposed flesh

And should I burn in the seventh layer
it is of no consequence to me
place me in hell and I will kill them all again

should my skin peel from my bones
incinerated by the heat of the oldest sin
I will always think it worth it
judge me Creator for I fear no moon

no man
no law
no lawlessness
no rampage

I only ever wanted to fashion birds with these hands
I only ever wanted soft righteousness not a countryside
riddled with the husks of dead raped women

They were like wild mustangs, the dark-eyed girls, cuckolded
shepherded to the slaughter knees like young colts,
necks bared and naked breasts an offering to the swine

All of their holes raped, looted and left to spoil
the assembly plants are swollen with the limbs of women
the dirt is caked with their blood

Don’t you know
you who wrought me
wrenched me from my terrible anger
dug out from the shell of my sleep with a dirty fingernail
my rebirth whispered
upon the dying lips of women
one last jewel of blood dropped to the floor

reaping
sowing

beseeching
vengeance

one fine golden
and glorious
day