Erika L. Sánchez reads two poems from her debut poetry collection, Lessons on Expulsion, published in July by Graywolf Press.
Forty-Three
The moment before death the air—
inexplicably—tastes of wet horse.
The chest expands and something
unspools like wet vines. In this land
of child-brides and teenage assassins,
a bus full of students dissolves
into the mountain mist. A retinue
of beheaded journalists mouth
clues while the young president
delivers platitudes. But what
do they matter? The students
don’t know the kilos of heroin
stored below them. A boy of 18,
eyes gray as bathwater, charts
a man’s face under his black
mask. Why even bother? the boy
wonders. The night’s only
witnesses—the stars, an ocelot,
a single strand of hair caught
in a barbed wire. Even the zopilotes
won’t eat the glut of the unsayable.
The blood-birds hiss and grunt
while a man with pointed teeth
whistles a love song. Why waste
time with metaphors? The body
is kindling. The body is a plastic
bouquet shriveled at a crossing.
The trees bow and weep, but
everybody knows the rain revises
nothing, the charred bones belong
to no one. Beyond the verdant
mountain, a caravan of mothers
and fathers beg a cankered country
for the locus of cruelty. Farther,
a troop of camouflaged men burn
fields of red poppies—those lovely
flowers of happiness and squalor.
A Woman Runs on the First Day of Spring
—Chicago
When I am a stranger to my own
ruin, twilight reminds me
to give alms to my best sins.
March: the city is purging
in the humility of worms, salt
washing from the grasses.
When I breathe in, I say thank you.
When I breathe out, I say gone,
I say garden, I say guns.
Three crows devour the dead
rat. Look at all that booty,
the man mutters and blows
me kisses. The sky is worthless
and my bulbous ass is always
a dinner bell. I run farther,
I run with a feather inside
my ear, I run from a bird
with a broken neck and follow
the sound of thawing snow.
Aren’t we all boundless
though? The way a dream
secretes the morning after,
the way moths feed on the eyes
of fawn. Two and not two—
vines that strangle trees never
say they’re sorry. I reach
the lake with this grateful
ache in my throat. And if I say
my body is its own crumbling
country, if I say I am always
my own home—then
what does that make me?
“Forty-Three” and “A Woman Runs on the First Day of Spring” from Lessons on Expulsion. Copyright © 2017 Erika L. Sánchez. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.