Jennifer Maritza McCauley

 
Amiguito

Dead-cold and unholy,
I revive and recoil in
Fresh-red city.

One night, you slip in sentences
while I am dying; they
alive the coal, and burn wild the
ever-breathing.

I haven’t seen you, ever,
but you or rather, tus palabritos: nuggets,
emerald-ed shine,
spin shuddering like a cloven thing,
the fast sprawl of sentence unwound:
never glib nor frayed,
unknotted, unclenched string.
Nos vemos, dear amiguito de correspondencia,
and even your grandfather clock knows that
time is very glorious and difficult.

The Space above Rain

Winter rain. Slicing water. Mira, sweetheart, I’m liberated: you know the full everything now. Those songs scribbled in the enormous chasm of your stretching wake. I said it all and now I sink wretchedly into January breezes.

Snow-furred maple. Kansas City-bright.

The violence in your quiet makes the wind mouths stretch open and spit old ice. I’m not waiting anymore. I am just very, very tired. Enervated. I abbreviate the entrails of your passing.

You are going to be fine. I am not.

Dead-cold trees, skinny pines bending and slapping gravel. Raindrops splattering the sides of unholied hands. What the hell do you remember?

I’m embarrassed always. Watching you is like glimpsing into a looking glass where all I see is old paint and I forget what my face originally looks like. I forget how to equate this rain to crying for you.

Cold droplets. Outside of this new window, the ice cream truck comes and there are teen-kids running to buy snowcones when it’s so very frigid.

I relate to them.
 

Jennifer Maritza McCauley is the author of cross-genre and speculative literature such as SCAR ON/SCAR OFF (Stalking Horse Press), When Trying to Return Home (Counterpoint Press), Kinds of Grace (Flowersong Press), and Neon Steel (Cornerstone Press). She is fiction editor at Pleiades, seasonal faculty at Yale Writers’ Workshop, and an assistant professor of English at the University of Missouri—Kansas City. website

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