BIO
Edwin Alanis Garcia is the author of Galería, forthcoming in 2018 from Ugly Duckling Presse. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU and is currently an MTS student in Philosophy of Religion at Harvard Divinity School.
Ode to the Superego's Guillotine
(After María Izquierdo's Sueño y presentimento)
I haven't spoken in years and
must vent to my therapist
via Morse telegraph:
Raul and I had another fight STOP
he says that we never talk anymore STOP
and I think, 'thank goddess for that' STOP
let that pendejo get a stroke STOP
so he'll be the one slackjawed and silent STOP
Then I cry and try to apologize, state that I'm
not a monster, though my throat only
mimics the wheels of a derailed train.
My therapist taps a pen made of human
bone against her clipboard. Her blazer is gray
besides a few bloodstains. She's wearing a black
t-shirt that says, “Psych majors do it on the couch.”
(She once said that nature's greatest gift is humor,
because with it you could make someone laugh
before you cut their heart out, at which point
¿who could discern a grin from a grimace?)
She says she wants to dig deeper.
She rubs blue paint over her face
and blows into a skull-shaped whistle.
Her naked orderlies cart out a TV
mounted atop a pyramid-shaped
contraption. I tap the obsidian
screen and it wraps me in wires;
the machine's electrodes are pasted
to my scalp. It's a monstrous device
of twitching lights called the Ekphrastastic 9000.
My therapist still won't speak, but takes
notes on my mindscreen:
the airy trees,
the engulfing window,
the inevitable garden
and its ocular rain.
She clucks her tongue, lifts a finger,
and a light bulb levitates above her
now headdressed head.
She reaches into her handbag and pulls out
a human head by its thick black hair, then
drops it onto her desk. The neck meat
plops onto her daily planner, the face
swivels and suddenly I'm looking at myself.
I'm very bloody, but pretty, and then my head
speaks:
Todos van a olvidarte.
My one functional hand
flips off the wall, believing it to contain
one of Diego's stupid fucking murals.
Then the hand rises to my cheek
to wipe a tear, instead finding empty space,
and it drips slick and ruddy
across a flailing body
until a stopwatch chimes
and our time is up for the week,
and for the years to come.
Notes on Hiding in Enemy Territory
(After Augustín Lazo's Fusilamiento)
southern sourblood family
sets root
in the midwest,
moved in
by building a fence.
because,
prescience.
before the fall of the Berlin Wall,
a
pissed anglo pissed
on our wooden pickets.
dad cussed him out
wielding the only Spanish
I knew.
white boy didn't know what he did,
please maybe forgive him for he
didn't know what he did (Toro. Mierda.)
[there's a possible line here where 'hate' rhymes with 'micturate', or where I neologize our hometown as 'Micturatlan', written in a possible world where I think I'm clever, thus safe.]
cognate white boy in grammar school
head popped under the bathroom stall
while I peed, waiting to scream at me
and see if I was shaded everywhere.
(in class he said if he had one hundred dollars
he would buy an army tank and that someone
would drop an atom bomb on my family's house.)
our little wall stood and stands, glory of rusted nails and moldy splinters
and isolated empire.
since that age
the nascent sin thrill
when I rake leaves
with one foot in
the neighbor's driveway,
undiscovered country in blacktop,
a place
with a proper name—oh the places we'll go—then
I step off the transgression
and am gone nowhere.