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Blac'ir
A girl whose hair is dark as my own
bears no ornament, save the comb
of my hardened fingers;
I color her torchlight with the tint
of my palms.
I do not write poetry for the girls with lighter hair.
I would not take their curls
if capped in flowers and thread in lush ribbon.
Do not come to me with the sun on your nape,
locks cropped ear-tip as a man or golden dull;
it speaks of who you are.
My woman
will have hair like the night sea
for me to tread my own tides.
***
Tekn (She)
My mother does not love me.
I am left in dens of porc-
-elain and
fermented fruits; her place
is the Holy Land
and when she comes to me
it is with a buckled stomach
in need of my provisions,
tense muscles for me to knuckle.
In her absence I find
valium and angst
keep me
still.
My words are written in backward hand,
my mirror looks at me with truth
that I am pathetic, pathetic.
Livid skin beaten blue.
I hold my past close to my heart;
there is nothing for me
anywhere else.
***
The Navigator
I don’t see myself as a man, rounded and empty
and unhappy to be, or a woman with a crying hole,
O-mouth, flat back and sharp tongue, who keeps
a thin sea in her gut.
I cannot drown in that sea anymore,
even if my rope is not tied to a pair of stones.
I will go south; follow my instinct to deeper waters,
longer darknesses, quieter voices, warmer hands.
I dream myself face-up like it is summer still.
Man or woman, I make corpses--
useless and without the white ribbon. Am I
so capricious that I dream winter instead?
Winter is the mad woman’s blood-sea;
red and glacial. She is a man in summer,
passion through a scope.
This is not what I want.
Love will not follow there. I will go south.
And there I will not be lacking. I will tunnel canals
with my clean nails; every sea and solstice will follow.
***
Hungarian Path
The sun never spreads the ground here.
Wildlife in estrus want only sleep, ersatz night
composes green pine white, the ground a cavern.
Somehow we came here together;
I stay now in the dark.
A waterfall is in perpetual spill, near, near.
It’s coming and going is a split spoke
on a tire no one rolls;
its splendor is cached, laid under the trees.
This is Hungarian Path. I come here to find light.
***
Anne under Starry Sky
She tread into the fire and I stamped her out
with indifference. I fed her drugs like a fine-tuned nurse,
lean hands, web veins, clocking in the needle’s shaft
without concern
and waiting for a break and breaking my bones
and oiling her charred skin with aloe and dyes;
all so I could lock her in a tin box
with a keyhole as a window.
I stoke the cinder with the same steel used
to cut her crisp gauze; this conflagration
I would not let die.
The fire is teched by the obdurate winter air,
rises vehemently, licks god’s palatal sky; starry night
is where it burns most violently.
She would have been pacified, kept warm;
had it as her own, as a sun
and a haven for her bitchery
and I
would have rather
watched her burn.
***
bio: Pedro Trevino-Ramirez is a young poet avoiding hibernation in the great white freeze of upper Michigan. He doesn't have a third nipple or sing in the shower, though he does find himself dancing at odd hours of the morning and quoting Kerouac.
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