First God
His head is a large copper drum with a snake’s tongue.
Everything dances against his body
because everything wants to plant something inside him.
He removes what they plant with a knife.
They are like slivers of shrapnel
that rise to the surface or travel beneath his skin toward his head.
He is sitting on the curb outside a Seven-Eleven
drinking a soda. He is scratching off the word money tattooed
beneath the skin of a ticket
until his fingers turn blue. Women are walking up
to the curb and jamming
seeds and candles into his back because they don’t know
that it will rain in two days.
The women’s faces are all shadows and strings.
This is how they end themselves.
It is 110 outside, he takes another drink from his Styrofoam cup.
He’s overweight and hasn’t gotten laid in months.
The women leave their candles in his back
and walk away through the gasoline
lots of believing they made something
happen. He takes another drink and begins to pick
shoots of corn that have already sprouted
from his chest with his knife.
Some have traveled near his heart
and will have to be left there. A man once lived
for twenty years with a bullet an inch from his brain.
It took that bullet twenty years to reach its target.
The store clerk yells at him to leave
and points to the sign on the window that’s big, red, and to the point.
As he stands up to leave he sees that you are staring.
The fuck you looking at? He says. The gold and bones hanging on his neck
rattle against his body as you pass him.
You don’t turn to look
but hear him mumbling as he takes one step
over the canyon
and lies down on the horizon
with his back to you which is bare and hazy.
You look and he has turned into a field riddled with corn in the distance
and there are pounds of rotting lavender wrapped in bundles
near what could only be his head that were never burned.
Short History of X
It isn’t a song or a fist
or the hummingbird
inside this fist
with its song already
outside its body,
or its wings crushed
in its chest or the fist letting go
and the abrupt pause
as if unsure—as
if the world were glassy
and the slow retreat
back into the palm
unzipping its grooves
and completely
disappearing in its bones
that are now flushed
in a cool electric drizzle.
God of Fertility
Fanning her feathers in the sun
she learns that she is pregnant.
There are thousands of eggs inside her
and she knows that most of them will die
which is why she never bothers naming them.
She needs to hurry otherwise they’ll
eat their way out of her. If they do
she will first feel them make their way
through her lungs. She won’t know what to listen for
but she’ll hear their rumbling like teeth grinding on gravel.
She lives in east LA and listens to music
on weekend mornings when she cleans.
She knows that some of them might eat each other.
She needs to hurry. She doesn’t know
that one of them will hatch and grow up to be
a mechanic. If you could follow him,
you could see him getting fired;
you could see him tossing dice on the curb
seventeen years from now. He’s the one
who ate his brothers, he’s the one with greasy
hair slicked back. He rolls a gum in his mouth
when he wants to make thunder.
He flicks his tongue to make small kicks
of lightning when his head is heaved between
a woman’s thighs as he tries to lick her tattoo
off with his tongue. He gambles and loses.
At night he sleeps in his clothes on a mattress
on the floor of his moist studio. Even the birds
that are attached to his hands harpoon themselves
towards the window because they are tired.
He wakes up in the yoke colored morning light
and is covered in flowers. Toothless women
are chanting around him because someone
can’t have a child in their village. He wishes he knew
what they were saying, he doesn’t know their language.
He doesn’t mind them anymore, they’ve grown
custom to his groans, when they approach him
with a rope tied at their ankles for dragging.
they think he understands them.
Sometimes he is paralyzed, other times,
he just closes his eyes, bites his lip and counts backwards
until they have finished and leave. They are old and
religious and he knows they’ll be back because they’re
always in need of miracles. Things keep trying
to give birth inside him as soon as they leave, it feels
like a prayer with teeth. Things keep leaving
their eggs in his rivers of hair
hoping to spawn but he tears them off like a price tag
from a pair of jeans he bought on sale at the Army.
You could see his tongue littered with eggs where the women
came to give birth at the river.
The women have left a calf on his bed.
He is tired and you know this.
He puts on his coat and walks out of his room
and burns the house down with diesel.
He says he’s going over to your place.[1]
[1] the last line is from Larry Levi’s poem, “the poem you asked for” in The Wrecking Crew
BIO
Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
came to the United States undocumented and is currently a “Dreamer.” He is a
Canto Mundo fellow and an MFA candidate at the University of Michigan. He has
held residencies from the Squaw Writer’s Workshop, the Vermont Studio Center,
and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Recent work can be found or is
forthcoming from Jubilat, The Journal,
and Devil’s Lake.