I say family despite the fact

I have attended none of their funerals

My abuelita was a ricocheting ghost

she died once    and I forgot

an entire language

Ok     I didn’t forget

it just became inconvenient to remember

who wants a language for the living anyway?

An inventory of my tongue

yields nothing

that looks like my mother

the resemblance stops at the mouth

She is fluent in a language

I am only ever ugly in

She falls asleep in front of the TV

her show muted

I wonder if in her dreams

I can speak

ON THE NIGHT I CONSIDER COMING OUT TO MY PARENTS

I am afraid, of something I am, but have never named. My tongue is a refuge for secrets. How does one still fear banishment if they were born an exile? There’s blood on the ground, no time remains so I’ll lay it flat: I am Black and Dominican and Bisexual. There. If I die now, you’ll have a hint for which god to petition. Sometimes, I look at a man and my hands are already digging into the small country of his back. In this way, the body is a distraction from what can make the body just a memory. My lips could bring a man’s blood to the surface; my mother raised a curse and gave it her face. I am afraid to belong to another thing, to become still more no man’s land. I am a trench; nobody comes to clear the dead. Somewhere, my mother is gripping a rosary to pray for men who look like me. Somewhere, my mother is praying for me. I do not want to give her something else to worry about. I am quiet, I bury no one, blood is drying beneath my nails, I do not know which me it belongs to.

(SELF) INFLICTED

I enter this story by the same door each time. Sweet tragedy, honeyed tongue of the night bucks down my throat again and again. It is as common a myth as I can bear: Everyone Remembers Their First Time. Suppose I do, for argument’s sake. Suppose a memory knows violence inherently as a wolf knows that it deserves. Suppose we can call the result, result. That it is something more than my need to be sacrificed to myself. I did this to myself, the shots quivered, then didn’t.

My face made smaller and smaller in the dimming melody. Taint me in the glass, eclipse a flood a quarter inch at a time. I am saying here, that if I pretend I can remember much of anything, I like to think I could see my face in the shot glass. Self as parenthetical, self as wound framed by the less tarnished. I did this to myself, surrounded by my friends who are all prettier than me. Now, too drunk. Now, gone. Now, faded; life span of a bruise.