Easter Sunday
(Ypolita Press, 2008)

Read Eileen Tabios’s review at Galatea Resurrects #14 here.

Requite

fingers, scratched, earth, honey, moon, recoil,
lapse, phases, understanding, recurrence, eclipses,
dream, doors, spells, abandoned, viscera, melody,

swishes, steam, bathwater, ailing, echoing, ricochet,
porcelain, tiles, telephone, receivers, requited, quit,
flower, etymologies, holding, significance, awaken,

bodies, water, accentuating, distances, traveled, bridges,
stars, opposing, directions, walking, continents,
ghosts, taste, skin, desire, believe, infallibility, love,

poems, singularity, logic, suspended, event, horizon,
habit, weakness, morning, blues, pallor, singeing,
backdrop, drape, velvet, remembering, girl, touching,

prayer, recall, sugar, bloodletting, birds, mourning,
birth, sparrows, needled, sky, wingspan, tattooed,
spine, raven, pearl, memory, replied, fragment.

–

Why I have no paintings on these walls
For Carolina San Juan, Carlo Ricafort, and England Hidalgo

Because I have not decided what makes a gold leaf star dust sky cerulean blue.

Here again this same inhabiting of someone else’s flesh:

Songs of sparrows. Music of crushed rubies.

Dissolved into the goldening of autumn.

Because you have no in-betweens, but lack nothing.

Smoke and its opposite. Love and its opposite.

Because of the charm of investing in lies.

Ease and its absence. Urge and its absence.

India ink seeping skeletons into skin.

Making like “forever” was never there.

Because illusions of beauty obviate sweetness.

No paintings on these walls:

No gauge, no claim, no honeyed words.

Without a smile, a dislocation:

Breaking of bones and bread.

The color of fire at its coolest state.

Wonder and the ochre of its tarnishing.

Never knowing the perfume of lilacs and sorrow.

Living lackluster as slow death.

Because these sparrows shall feast from my hands if I remain still.

Because there is an art to this willingness to bleed.

The silence and starkness of these silvered stars.

–

To order your copy of Easter Sunday, go to the Ypolita Press website.