Poetry by Andy Pérez

          Alexander Rabb CC



​CHARLIE


this is for the boy i loved
so much i let his name
become a bone in my heart,

the boy who breaks dawn
into symphonies, a night that lasts
a little longer.

his nails cut crescents,
bloodless moons
into his clenching palms. 

he is not the kind of boy
who can make a fist
out of such fingers.

i take him into the rain,
him and his violin and say
play me something, amor

see: how easy it is to love him
with his fingers trembling
on the strings, how his liquid

lull catches in the droplets
clinging in the hollow of his throat.
yes, he lets me at his neck.

i have scraped my teeth
over that sacred dip for nights on end.
the sky hangs so low, so still around us,

i am sure god has turned his face away
for a moment. he has given me a night
in which his song stills even light.

see, how beautiful
a boy on the cusp
of drowning. 

four months later,
he will look himself in the eye 
for the first time and swallow

all of his father's heart medicine.

i couldn't love him enough
to stop his body becoming a husk of soil,
an underground strain.

i couldn't love him enough
to make his heart
a song.

i am standing in a room of boxes
at midnight, shirtless and swaying
to a tune on the radio.

it aches something of his hands
in the stilled street,
something swelling, cracking

inside of me.
i open my mouth to sing
and am choked by feathers. 

look, 
               still

the song-bird of slivered moons
rising from this little grove, 
the marrow he left singing. 

again, i lead him by the hand
into the stuttering of the rain,
the swollen streetlights,

the aching moon.
again, he lends me
one more hour to live.

one more song
that softens my bones,
leaves me trembling.

charlie, i see you like this:
keening, curled over your violin
soaked in light.




A LIST OF THINGS I HAVEN'T TOLD MY HUSBAND


1. it starts with a humbling at the knees. summer hardened into flesh.

2. the way my father's eyes dimmed as he beheld the bloody, pulsing cut of a child. the runt of the litter.

3. I wish he'd drowned me when he had the chance, not four years later when I could choke myself awake again. twenty four years ago, a drowning child. now, a man, hands wrapped around my own throat.

4. my sundays spent, knelt & repentent before a man I've been trying very hard to love or forget, whichever will hurt less. kid fists clutched at the waist band of his unbuckled jeans.

5. you think I have spent far too long on my knees. you have no fucking clue.

6. I still haven't forgiven myself.

7. the time I let a man build a summer home inside me for five bucks & half a sandwich. the two, three, five ten twenty nameless men sticking between my teeth.

8. it was enough to put food on the table. clothes on my back, just to be shed in the alley behind school, letting a man pull the breath from my throat and not praying. so very not praying.

9. the sheer fucking hunger of his hands, in the very marrow of him, singing a famine song for the hollow-cheeked kids at the lawn table inside, house wrung with jésus, maría y joseph. he leaves me clutched in my mother's arms, reluctant grasp of a woman who knows she lost the battle a long long time ago.

10. our family history is soaked in salt.

11. how she knelt by me, all through the night, suddenly very still. the bruises on her knees. how do you tell a woman like that? the sun rose bloody, weak. watered down wine.

12. by the time I am eight, I know my body was never built to stay together.

13. these days I look down at hands I still don't recognise. pulling the trigger. digging through sand & sand & sand.

14. sometimes, I didn't mind my father's hands. just something to hold me here, pushing my head under the blue-breaking waves cresting the age-stained bath, an ocean only for a child. the water is not salty, in my mouth I still taste it. flick the memory over my tongue & swallow it down. a man cannot hold so many ghosts in him & still walk unhaunted, head unsevered. still leave footprints.

15. I have been trying very hard for a long, long time.

16. he pressed every inch of skin to the mattress, the same place he will fuck his wife into oblivion in an hour or two. the stains, he will tell her, are from a paper cut. nothing more. what to do with the living wound of the child? the salt-sealed lips?

17. in the lessons of flesh & hunger, I found my skin was a thing I could crawl out of.

18. I couldn't tell you why I was so quiet. silence, after a time, festers in the wound of the throat. atrophied & apathetic & blind. salt rot.

19. I'm still waiting to come home.
​
20. I buried my mother the same way I discovered gravity, the weight of it a comforting heaviness pooling around my ankles. we are all held down by something. a dead mother. a lack of love. a father with vietnam inside him. a life spent trying to crawl into graves, thinking thank god there is something to keep me here. thank god I don't have to do this forever.

21. we are still choking on all this sand. gritty & irrefutable between us, lingering in the dregs at the bottom of your glass as you take my hand, lead me inside to thrash.

22. I don't know how to love you right. I'm sorry I just don't.

23. once I cracked open your chest & found nothing but salt & sand & sadness.

24. I'm sorry.

25. I'm sorry.

26. I'm sorry.

27. I just don't want to die anymore.

28. I take it all back. the men & the fucking & the senseless graves, the blood-blessed, brief & devastating floundering between your arms, the stumbling drunk & profound on fisted words, I don't know how to speak after so many years of silence a lifetime of men choking ghosts into me, leaving me bloody & alone in a bath-tub wine-dark sea, please. just let me love you, please.

29. I need to tell you something.




BLACK DOG


I'm sorry I miss you like this.
Your girlfriend, white-knuckled,
waiting in the car.

Picking her fingers apart
and tossing the bones
in the air, leaving them scattered

and stark over the dash board, saying
she can predict the future. See?
See? People take themselves apart for you.

I'm sorry I can't butcher
my heart for you,
can't feed the scraps

to the junkyard dog
scrabbling at the door, I'm sorry
we're all pinned beneath delineated ribs.

I can't give you promises; 
I still need my hands.

The picket fences, the pomegranates,
the girl rattling her nails
in our truck. 

I’m sorry I can't give you what you want. 

The list of things I lay out:
Forgiveness. Flesh. A knife.
I want you to take it and gut me.

Leave me strung, emptied, 
hardened by your hunger.
I want to see my rib cage picked clean,

white and gleaming: you've been asking,
for a long time, of my heart.
I lay out the knives on the counter.

See?

You have a diagram of what to do.
I can't tell you everything,
I've tried the words, spindle-black corpses- 

they just don't work.
I've tendered my flesh.
Just take the knife. 

You know now, the swallowed seeds
at the centre of me. 
This is the part where I'm clawed open

and kept by a dark man
with dirty fingernails. 
I need to let something inside me,

emptiness is not complete
without the craving
and cramming.

The pomegranate seeds,
bursting at the seams, fruit
turned monster, entrails,

the insides of a dog. His tail
stirring in the dirt,
tongue lapping at my hand.

The man chewing me up,
spitting me out the door
to a sad black dog offering me

the only tenderness he can. 
I have 6 regrets, 6 times I swallowed too soon.
6 times I let the knives go blunt. 

I fed the wrong dog.
I fed the wrong dog.

This is the part where you go mad
without me, an ecstasy of grief.
Then null.

I don't come back from this.
The seeds are swallowed, I'm sorry
you can't just plant another tree.

I'm sorry I loved you so much. I'm sorry
you let all the crops die and I'm sorry
we never stop starving, I'm sorry

I couldn't keep food on the table
instead of rotting in the fucking closet,
I'm sorry I needed you to hurt me

and I'm sorry you couldn't.
I'm sorry gave you everything
but my hands.

The damn dog's still starving, and I'm sorry
I have no more sadness
left to feed him.

Just go, ok? Your girlfriend's waiting.

​

Andy Pérez is a latino combat veteran and "crazy artist" since ‘85, paramedic and poet when inspiration inconveniently strikes. He lives happily with his cat and husband.

---