By Jennifer Maritza McCauley
Happy Perreo
Aquí, estoy de nuevo.
Fished Dante’s old-washed
bones from new hell,
I’m dancing
to a widening beat,
oh these bones
remind me of Jonah’s
whale ribs
pero forget it.
Perreo.
Was always stuck inside of some mouth,
or rather an intricate language
or another danza.
Anyway.
Lost fast chunks of baby hair in the process
of ever/evolution
gripped the excess in my fist and shook
it like wizard wand; turned
it fiery as
phoenix, lifting to the neon-fringe
of heaven, or something greater
than rising.
Anyway.
This poem is about the lip
of your last line or flash
of kind-faced photo, nay
the silences in your sentences,
Pure dulce.
Sugar-skinned.
How I want to bite
that sweetness
until it blushes red.
Let’s get it over with.
I’m too much like my father; I can’t
stop sprinting toward some amorphous Something,
Flimsily, I have my mother’s tongue, with her little
boleros stuck in big breast, bursting forth from the throat
And I want to tell you all this
Instead I think of you.
Anyway.
It’s weird to be happy.
Even for a day, drenched
in the bliss of dulce,
it’s okay in the space
of a second
to retire.
When Palmieri Wakes You
¡que día bonito!
¡qué lindo mi día, mi día bonito!
este es un día bonito para mí
Mira, I’m going to center these little hips
until they’re pointed in the right direction
of the stepping I wanna do, straight-line
til’ I funk it, ‘til the mean floor makes
Mami’s tacones strike and swivel, that
makes the bang and slam of the brown drum
wake me into thrill and here we are
on un día bonito
bonito y sabroso, qué rico lleno de colorido
Clap clap clap clap
Nothing but a little shudder of sound
on un día bonito, methodic patter
here, dancing, in this
computer chair as the sun makes
a racket of light against
the window’s stretching sheen,
it’s fine to just yearn
for a new day.
Jennifer Maritza McCauley is the author of SCAR ON/SCAR OFF, When Trying to Return Home; Stories and Kinds of Grace: Poems. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Kimbilio and CantoMundo and her work has been a New York Times Editors’ Choice, Best Fiction Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews and a Must-Read by Elle, Latinx in Publishing, Ms. Magazine and Southern Review of Books. She is fiction editor at Pleiades and an assistant professor in English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.