Ashley Porras
Poem
For DJ
Denis I saw you walking the highway side paths
dried out behind the benches where buses never come.
I saw you sitting on a parking block outside Pizza Hut.
Denis I heard you borrowed a stranger’s phone to call me for cash.
Denis when I take the train in, I see the salt mounds
before anything else.
Denis the freebasers want us to come over after dark.
Denis the cheap drink hour just got cheaper.
Denis we get so drunk we see the art in everything.
The overgrown grass on a gas station marquee.
Denis in my mind you’re in the sand marsh smiling,
your curled hat on like some kind of summer cowboy.
Denis the women levitating out of the Gentlemen’s Club
this evening are silhouettes against the laundromat light
which I swear is just a front for the Underworld,
and Denis if you come right now goddammit Hades himself
will crawl out of one of these tumbling machines
Señor Lorca Epistle
Señor Lorca,
No se sabe mucho sobre Helena de Troya aparte de su voz, y no te culpo por eso. Tampoco te culparé por la ausencia de las cosas dichas por Dios, o lo que sepulta la neblina. Lo que quiero saber es lo que voy a recibir a cambio por compartir mi corazón por cualquier cosa, por la sombra que obra antes de la madrugada. Quiero dormir un rato—un rato, un minuto, un siglo. O ir a la niebla para considerar lo que queda atrapado en la estructura de palabras, en el collage de lo real, en las manzanas.
Con Amor,
AP
Señor Lorca,
Not much is known about Helen of Troy other than her voice, and I won’t blame you for that. I also won’t blame you for the absence of things spoken by God, or what buries the fog. What I want to know is what I will receive for exchanging my heart for anything, for the shadow that labors before dawn. I want to sleep a while—a while, a minute, a century. Or go to the fog to regard what is caught forever in the structure of words, in the collage of the real, in apples.
With Love,
AP
Drunk on the Moon
It’s closing time on the moon and the mad dust people
can hardly give it a rest. Light has yet to reach them.
They carve their faces in the dark. We stumble, groping
the night for stalagmites to lean on, use the eyes of our feet
to feel out the edges for craters. When the telephone booths
ring, the sound goes on forever until you just have to believe it.
My father’s father believed his silver ring would burst
if an evil spirit got too close to him. I never knew if it did.
Everything here is on a delay. The bar still appears “OPEN”
to them on Mars. The geraniums don’t sway like they do on Earth,
when my body moves through them. I don’t think there’s a single
soul out here, and anyway I’m not sure how wind works in space
or where the cheapest drink is. They just keep bowing further and
further away from their old lives with nothing to hold them up.
after The Ballad of Escape
There is no night in which, giving a kiss,
one does not feel the smiles of the faceless people
and there is no one in touching something recently born
If your hands had been meaningless, I would still hold
the fear of sugar meeting my teeth, of the disembodied
arm marveling in the middle of any ocean. The rope that catches
nothing. We are smooth in this frictionless nature.
Where the cypress tree is concocted from lemon
and groans. In this hour of your absolute necessity
your breast is stuffed with seeds.
Jack Spicer Epistle
Dear Jack,
I will always miss winter; the universe could fall apart; disclose a diamond and we would still call it loneliness. Our transmissions on the snowbank computing block parties from a matador. What role do the recurring things play if not protection from misunderstanding? Eyes as deep as a train station terminal or a parking lot light when you speak from the corner of my bedroom after dark. The breathless people who believe everything’s been spoken for, their shadows. The fools who fill their ears with the newly cut flowers of spring. Their shadows, fecund homes for fool-killers like us. And you have never known me in summer.
Love,
AP