For days to situate the flesh in whose inadequate precinct
motionless: a monolith of the often spoken
of which nothing is
certain: or abstract of whose gender to the use
of all acknowledged desire formal
parlance & pronoun
to form the stars across your back: whose hardened
muscle: tremendous lateral delta
of which to the shoulders:
there is a way from yes: the very inside an eternal
tick of the left eye: a language
not only illegible as
the vain translation of a fictive contradictory
self & its consonant verb to be:
but the body’s crystal
falling through a grey film of failed memory
& brushfire this Autumn midnight:
to unfold (in the form
of your body) pleasured corners of a place
in which the difficult new breathing
and I are foreigners
Roberto Tejada, “Dyspnea” from Mirrors for Gold. Copyright © 2006 by Roberto Tejada. Reprinted by permission of Krupskaya.
Source:
Mirrors for Gold (Krupskaya, 2006)
An art historian, curator, and editor specializing in Latino and Latin American art, Roberto Tejada was born in Los Angeles. He earned a BA in comparative literature from New York University and a PhD in interdisciplinary media studies from the English Department at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is the author of the poetry chapbooks Gift & Verdict (1999) and Amulet Anatomy (2001) as well as the full-length . . .
Continue reading this biography
Poem of the Day: Dyspnea
