Please, (With)Hold Me
This mattress is just
a thin(skinned) dummy
for the bitter
-sweet slick lacuna
of a womb’n; and yes,
I say womb’n in spite
of the fact that not
every womb’n will burgeon
a baby—she is
a biochemical potent
ial; and yes, I say womb’n
because not
every womb’n
who burgeons a baby
will keep the baby; and yes, import
antly, because not
every womb’n
who burgeons a baby
and keeps the baby
should call her
self a mother; and yes, finally
because I am
self-infatuated: I do not need
a mother. But I do
want to be
swaddled complete
with neoteric-new lungs—
seal unbroken—white
fluorescence unseen, a
doctor-man’s smack
against my bottom
rewound. I am
only honest. [†]
---------------------------
[†] Just sayin’
A Girl Crush
Eeek, whatever to do
about the torque feral
between our hearts
among other things? I
told my mother & she saw
the calculations she
redrew while re
fencing the argument be
tween the cellophane pages
of the old & new
testaments. I gave it true
to you. I said, this isn’t
only an experiment
in elation borne of spec
ulation. But my mother,
she sat me on the bed
and told me that the
experiment had been
tabulated. The normativity
in her wavers, split out of her
& hovers & it’s bottom
lip trembles, confused, but eggs
her on the shoulder blades. It is
what it is, is what
she says. Boys
will be boys. Play with your
sugar crumb toys. & my
brother, too young to help,
does. He says, I never want
to suck on little boys—
St. Raphael School: With God All Things Are Possible
When we bound and gaggl’d up in
to social groups, I fell in love with
the discord of lady shackles: the ooo-
la-la so-subtle scent of perfume’d
tampons wafting up from be
tween our thighs. Maybe
I miss that, the slow grind
of time measured by the cool
pollute of your words in my
direction, shut in wide-
ruled school paper, folded
again & again so I could pick up
the work in unfolding you
r note before glutting up the doodlegrin
slipped in & then at the end, slowly,
rupturing my mouth radical-wide
to gulp up the the itty bitty poison-winks
that dotted your ‘i’s: bones fashioning
the skulls. You’d want the pink
slip when you turned in work to Sister
Rosa like that, playing witless,
playing like girls us girls could fit between
the serif’d lines of scripture forever, playing
like our hands were cold during
recess, whisper-growling, K.I.T. Don’t
ever change.
playing right
the way i shout into
the fluorescence
technicolor slurs of my
being does not effect
them: their lives & the serif’d
bills in circulation,
cuffing certain neighbor
hoods; but they have a right,
they say, to voice that they are
confused; they say, oh,
can you please punctuate
your body into tighter fabrics;
we need to see the silhouette
of your lot in life & could you, you
know, take this bottle of sun
screen & splat yourself white
before going into day
light. actually don’t
take walks with the sun
out, or late at night either, if you don’t have
to & i am curtsies and shivers,
usually, but now, i am willing
to say, i’ve stopped bathing
in milk, hoping to whittle
into Cleopatra— no
not the real one,
the white lady one with a creamy
disposition & and a nodding body.
Sonata in Jabón de Sangre
Since you’ve left, I get rest-
less near the cusp
of the morning. An “eclipse
of sense” is what my therapist
eureka’d at me during the end
of our first session, me describing
what I do: I try to make myself
wake up at night,
with my eyes closed, to grab on
to your far-away and pixelated
dream-face. Pretend
it is happening now. Later, I decide
I am going to write
the sonata
we wrote together,
in my dream. In it you whispered,
Ya vez, loca! So I named it
Llaves Locas. You would have
hated it. But I keep your face,
on the inside of my dream-gauzed eye
lids, while I climb
down the stairs, saddle up
to the piano, sit on bench, and reach
into the shallow wash basin full
of soap sediment and water. Dirty
is how the new rag feels as I plunge
it into the basin, wring it over my feet,
and scrub until the water flickers
and expands with red from
my soles. Now, I can stand
on the white and black
enameled slabs, focusing
the toes of my feet on
the keys.
Adolescent on the Way to Water
Whittling soft bark, thumbing the grooves gently,
the transient caught me peeking from the car;
As if to pluck me with his knife, he
waved over while my father idled
in the gas station’s. Hiking up my skirt
I shimmied out
of the car to him and sat down so naturally, legs crossed,
in the ice machine’s shade. He stood & looked
down at me. In the sun, the knife he used
to scratch his beard glinted back and forth my face. Dizzily,
I waited for him to say anything. And when he did,
it went something like this: You look like you know what you could do
with a knife and some wood if I gave you the chance. Girl, I’d pop out
each one of your teeth and make a new drama of constellations
that’ll spread out our story longer than it will take the sun to die
— or maybe it went something more
like I’d appreciate it if you’d take me
to Alamogordo, little ma’am.
Regardless of the exact positioning,
it was then I wondered:
Did he know I thought about feeling him
on me, everywhere: on the pads of my
fingertips, cliff of my nose, edged-lining
of each toe, and in the silkened, scalloped
world between my legs while
my father’s keys hung heavy,
ready in the slot of the ignition.
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Dominique Salas is an MFA candidate and instructor at New Mexico State University. She has recently appeared in riverSedge, Dead Flowers: A Poetry Rag, and The Blue Lake Review.