Poetry by Elias Siqueiros

Migrants


After lunch, sit, sit,
here among the peanut shells,
here in the swell
of the downriver current
where the bluesman sits and plays
a guitar with razor blades.
He’s got new shoes,
a haircut, a seashell at his mouth
like a harmonica.
Like a polka beat comes
the heart thrill,
the sky meets his eye
with a camera-ready smile.
I am all this I see, antipodal,
armored-heavy, a seagull
sort-of,
all this I think is the land
grown from suburban roots
given proclivities to be
so much natural flora,
U-hauls moving in formation
through the last hope
of an aurora blinked out of the
west,
saying go back east,
no one can afford Huntington Beach.
So we gather the songs
and prayer books.
We gather the mossy mirrors
and caravan back to low rents
and maple trees and inverted steps.
I hear you, guitar player,
hear your promise, and walk out
to the car thinking history
is nothing but financial necessity.
Old man playing blues
along a dark red river, there is
no imagination which does not
come together
as necessity.
The guitar player’s not real
because I am not his father.
I cannot create purely out of a longing
for his representation.
He is a ghost of my needing.
He is the country I’m not seeing.

​


The End Of History

    
Everything at the end of history
has this incredibly empty sound like hitting a tin
can at its side.
                             A mountain could crumble at the lips,
and it would not matter,
what was said could not be taken back.
What was human reverts to its image of blueberry
waffles, a Coptic signboard
governing the emotions with an interior want, a
spastic moving of the sofa
from one end of the living room to the other.
                               She came to me after so many dreams
                               wearing the same T-shirt
                               as the one I always slept in.
The end of history
is a time when we no longer need the critics to interpret
our times for us.
                               For them we have eaten out enough,
                               drunk enough alcohol, to be bled through,
                               to want the concrete system of fingers, bones, and starch
                               of which humanity is barely a branch.
            
                               -and the doors open to the possibility of being wrong,    
                               of being wrong all the time-
        
Beauty is still a carpentry worth learning.
Fences are still planted where they come up highest
when the language, full of burrs,
                                holds to the fingers in a bit of pain.
Liquid presence,
the shape is the condition and the need,
what then that it rots at the end of a beach and we hold
no particular regret?
                                Kyle has gone to work for Halliburton
                                but here he is with wings attached and nears
                                in knee-deep isolation to prod the corpse
                                as it is in mind coal, fracked gas, memory
                                of Mary’s diamond final structure.
Though there are no angels there are near Galveston
gas stations along the highway with sacred flames of war.
I say, look there, the pelicans come up
with their jowls purple and their pockets campfire heavy.
Let your walk select no quicker destination,
no immediate interference.
A man in a San Antonio bus station walked about
with a great tumor on his forehead. He took pictures
from his Nikon through a big lens of anything
that moved or clung to an original idea of itself.
His eyes were made over into a new thing, fashionably wide,
and see there, in his step, the tower which shall rise
from long naps.
                             Mary, young again, nearing the coast of god-
                             awful country wearing only
                             a university T-shirt and a baseball cap.
                             The people in the country were like the first people,
                             the ones she never met.
                             The homes were like the first houses, the ones
                             she could not believe in.
                             The children were as her child but not
‘                            slaughtered at whim.
                             She could not know the large concussion of people
                             by whom she’d become human again
                             without war and without symbol.

​

Bio: Elias Siqueiros is a Texas poet resettled in New England. His work has appeared in Milk, Moria, Stirring, Word Riot, DecomP, and elsewhere. He is the author of the poetry collection The Heart Of An Animal. 

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