UC Riverside UCR Honors Capstones 2020-2021 - Title - eScholarship
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UC Riverside
UCR Honors Capstones 2020-2021
Title
Bestiary of Boys in Love
Permalink
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/16c1x596
Author
Lopez, Claus
Publication Date
2021-08-13
eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library
University of CaliforniaBESTIARY OF BOYS IN LOVE
By
Claus Lucas Lopez
A capstone project submitted for Graduation with University Honors
March 15, 2021
University Honors
University of California, Riverside
APPROVED
Dr. Melissa M. Wilcox
Department of Religious Studies
Dr. Richard Cardullo, Howard H Hays Jr. Chair
University HonorsABSTRACT
The last couple of years have witnessed a boom in mobilization efforts within creative writing
circles and institutions to bolster platforms for the production, publication, and analysis of literary
works that accurately and powerfully represent historically marginalized and deprivileged
communities, both as authors and as actors within their literary works. These communities traverse
a vast spectrum of human qualities, including race, migration history and status, religious
affiliation, physical and mental (dis)abilities, sexuality, gender identity, socioeconomic status, and
more. Due to their history of marginalization in various spheres of society, these communities have
often had their identities subjected to political, moral, and spiritual scrutiny. One of the results of
having their humanity doubted or undermined due to these particular qualities is the transformation
of such qualities into powerful sources of identity that the individuals can then seek to highlight
and advocate on behalf of. This collection of poetry explores how marginalized individuals
develop and manage these identities through the medium of creative writing, including how they
represent themselves and seek community with both members of their groups and outsiders. In
other words, it will analyze how individuals develop a sense of identity in response to their
experiences with marginalization and with communities within the marginalized groups they
belong to, and how creative writing, and especially poetry, is a uniquely equipped vehicle through
which such individuals can analyze and explore their own identities and then communicate their
identities and experiences with others. I will be focusing especially on the unique experiences and
struggles that LGBT people of color living with mental and/or physical disabilities confront in the
intensely patriarchal, white-supremacist, and capitalist climate of the United States, as well as how
these individuals have forged communities of support, growth, healing, and advocacy without
relying on legal, medical, and government officials.
2ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many thanks to my parents, Juan Manuel Lopez Mariscal and Andrea Lin Spears Kirkland, for
raising and caring for me throughout these many years, and for encouraging me to pursue my
passion for creative writing and poetry. My mother, although she did not live to see this, would
surely be very proud of me, as I am of her and her memory. Many thanks as well to Melissa M.
Wilcox, for agreeing to be my faculty mentor and for being a source of constant support and insight
throughout my college career, as well as for always being willing to offer an attentive ear and
comforting words in times of great stress. I would also like to thank Rachelle Cruz for hosting the
creative writing classes and workshops in which the majority of these poems were first conceived
and for providing valuable advice throughout the revision process. Finally, I owe the greatest
thanks to my closest friends and found family members, who not only were the first readers of
these poems and kindly provided their initial thoughts and feelings regarding them but have also
helped keep me alive and in love with life: Zamir, Maya, Ariana, Wolfgang, Pom, and Vani.
3CONTENTS
TITLE ............................................................................................................................................ 1
ABSTRACT.................................................................................................................................... 2
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................................ 3
I – Ekphrasis ................................................................................................................................... 5
II – Still Life.................................................................................................................................... 7
III – Eidolon .................................................................................................................................. 10
IV – Metempsychosis ................................................................................................................... 12
V – Transfiguration ....................................................................................................................... 14
VI – Report From 06/20/2016 @ 11:50 PM; Incident: Disappearance ........................................ 18
VII – Report From 07/15/2017 @ 1:45 AM; Incident: Anniversary ............................................ 22
VIII – The Last Time I See You ................................................................................................... 26
IX – La Gargouille & el Nahual ................................................................................................... 31
X – How to Fall in Love in a Psychiatric Hospital ....................................................................... 36
REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................. 38
4I – Ekphrasis
Permit me to paint you a poem:
Your redemption arc grew in late, so I had to cleave open your shoulder blades
with a survival knife to release your wings. Blood loaded the gossamer feathers
with impotency, the stench of vulnerability’s homecoming attracting your ancient
predators. But the plumule was lukewarm & there was room for me, finally,
beneath & beside you. You said you loved how the white in my eyes scrambled
at the sight of you, said it made you feel like an artist again. I believed you because
anything
a person says while dying is the absolute truth to them.
In the director’s cut version of our life, I braid sweetbriar into all your loose ends & we
settle
down for dinner with both of our families at the end of each day. In the director’s cut
version of our life, my biggest flaw is my fractured jawline & yours is still answering
your mother’s phone calls.
Doctors tried with us but the truth is no one has the time to sit in a dark room
watching the reel of someone else’s life, while their own waits like a lover in time-out
under the exit sign, & we needed everything examined & labeled, sorted into the proper
boxes before we could even contemplate moving out of our minds. So there’s no
director’s cut, but there is a brief B-side, & it sounds exactly like the concluding track
to the first album to make you cry inside yourself. We prayed six times to Saint Winifred,
5her severed head, the well of immortality that sprouted where it fell. Meanwhile,
the Museum of Swallowed Objects received your baby teeth, neatly assembled
into a friendship bracelet. Rich people used to pay to have their medicine rolled
into capsules of gold & today a woman is instructing parents to feed their children
bleach as a cure for autism, but somehow we still find avant-garde ways
of going down in medical horror history.
People are presented with art & say, “I see…” where nothing existed there before. You
are presented with my feelings & say, “I see,” where nothing existed as far as I
was concerned. We call all our art abstract because then no interpretation can be wrong
or right. A degree in Art History did not prepare me for you. The perfect whorls
of Van Gogh’s cyclones had wormed into the grooves of my amygdala, & you looked at
that
beautiful misery & spat: only an idiot dies for their art. A cruel stroke dealt by a kind
& inexperienced brush. Oil paintings take hundreds of years to dry, so permit me
to paint you an oil poem:
I wish I could have grown up with you. I wish I could have given whoever sketched
your blueprints some tips on composition, touched up on the symmetry & equal distribution
of weights. Cropped out of the product accepted for publication: a super blood wolf moon
waxing you into my most tender lover. When the Mona Lisa was stolen, shipwrecks of people
threw their anchors to fast in the presence of her absence. That is the best I can hope for,
once this moment is done.
6II – Still Life
Still life of Flow State:
Still life of Necessity: Euneirophrenia ripples across your flank like the blur of artificial lights
through an inattentive lens, sinks nascent incisors into your spine & bursts
through your shoulder blade. A dislocated bone, skin peeled to flaunt pyroclastic flesh. The
scales,
like a gang of nervous, crimson beetles, scuttle back & forth in search of the safest
pattern.
Imbricate, each gnashes into its neighbors, regurgitates the acid coating of scarab opal.
Tectonic tantrums. Tectonic concussions. Cognitive smog anoints you with a second
silhouette, smoke bomb for when your ancient predators finally accuse you of being an enemy
of the state. Are those my funeral lilies tucked into your breast pocket? Saying “no” to
you
is hard, like folding our birth certificates into origami tigers: too many steps to remember;
too many opportunities for paper cuts. Which is to say, I am your primary caretaker &
your emergency contact person. People describe you as gauche, but I think you’re more
like gouache: easy to rewet, quick to fuse into your paper support. Carved from raw
fugue,
your contours are the temptation to commit a crime of passion against myself. Dear 911,
why are people always dialing 911 to talk shit about us? Is this a low-budget film
adaptation
7of the cult classic House of Leaves? No answer is still an answer. My vocal cords may have been
slit
& swallowed, but you, babe, still taste like a blood bank. I’m a therapist
that doesn’t know how to leave his own problems at the door. Is there really any difference
between being in a flow state & dissociating? Your tears, like ruptured blood vessels,
remind me that crying is just another animal instinct we are commanded to civilize. Those
Komodo
dragon contact lenses suit you. Those wings also suit you. Are they elliptical? Like
Barnum’s
Fiji mermaid, or anything out of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, you materialize
from imagined mythologies. (Aren’t all mythologies imagined?). Eyeh Asher Eyeh:
we are who we are / we will be who we will be / we cause to be what we cause to be. It’s veal
season & there are treble hooks through our wrists. It’s veal season & you cough, hoping
for blood, disappointed by air. The euneirophrenia was from a dream where we each had
our own bodies, fought & spoke & held each other just like everyone else. But, you
know,
I kind of like us more this way. When Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha said, “abuse
survivors
are the ones that get the weird diseases,” we really felt that. Now that your skin
is pomegranate, it hides the razor pockmarks. Loving you, I finally understand why dinosaurs
8traded their teeth & claws for so many feathers. Still, your wings drag like daggers
& if we don’t hurry this jungle will kill us.
When you leave, I write poems about you. When you stay, I also write poems about you.
In case you hadn’t noticed, this is a reworked love poem.
This, babe, is just to pass the time until someone else
writes a poem about their fractured relationship.
9III – Eidolon
Lungfish, you gasp on my bed of dry land, then slosh back into the swamp to dream
of our next meeting. Your webbed mitts snap shut like steel-jaw traps or vampire squids
around the archipelago of my musculature, pockmarked & splintered from shipwrecks
turned artificial reefs. Kissing your neck, moisture trickles into your gills & you breathe in
knowing no oxygen is to be garnered from it. Your vocal cords, massaged harp, trill
their tenderness. You finger-feed me mussels by the docks ‘til I’ve gathered enough husks to
carve
you a skinning knife, our real names scrawled in cursive into the hilt. You wear it
strapped to your humerus while we swim, spar, flirt. In the estuary thickets, tiger shark
pups cuddle into the nursery of your underbelly, hungry for a womb that won’t pit them
against their own kin. Their nibbling tickles the dome of your palm, outstretched & patient
long before my first tempest tantrum. Sashaying in the shallows, you bruise a capillary &
we
watch blood flood the translucent membrane between your fingers. Bowed, my basalt lips
harden & cool into the silhouette of your chimerical pulse. The Super Blood Wolf Moon
snared in the hooks of your eyes waxes & the Mars cinched to my ribcage fluctuates into
retrograde, dragging like a dagger across volcanic vents in the ocean’s trench. You:
Double-Heart of Stacked Stones, I: seismic sea swells that waltzed into your tidal pools –
espoused.
10Like a sockeye salmon, you fast in the flow of fresh water, allocate all of your energy to
love-
making. Babe, I can’t keep nestling your mer-body into my lap if it means you won’t survive
the journey homebound. Instead, carry me on your sanguine dorsal fin as you would
a life raft, a buoy for when the eddies of your insecurities inundate.
Babe, tie me to your tail
& I’ll be your living Atlantis.
11IV – Metempsychosis
Imagined ode from my past life to your next life:
the dobhar-chú oozed out of my cerebral aqueduct at daybreak, thrashing through the marsh
in pursuit of its extirpated mate. I was ready with a skinning knife but heard its forlorn
howl & resigned to mopping dry the cottage floorboards again. The woodsfolk call me “thing”
with palms espoused, a prayer for no sentient creature to ever be etched in my profile.
I forgive them because I am the last of my ilk, so myth might as well asphyxiate me in its
bismuth roots. You court reincarnation, greater bird-of-paradise flaunting nearly
enough tenacity to be drafted. The coelacanth scales you molted while exiting
your last life scintillate like amber, dead & drowning secrets. I fracture my tooth
trying to crack one open, learn my lesson. Like the Loch Ness Monster, you announced
your existence with a blurry middle school mugshot, then couldn’t handle all the
backhanded attention & pretended to have fabricated everything, offered a reward for your
arrest, dead or alive. Phantom bullseye: twenty points for the flank, fifty for the ribs,
a hundred per headshot. The ahuizotl in me has purloined all the nails & teeth from your burial
mound, but they spew no comfort, just make me miss you more, & all through the nights
I cry, “where’s my baby-boo, where’s my baby-boo?” & then, wading through the stygian
waters,
mistaking expensive trash for your hide, “You know I’m here for my baby-boo, & I know
I’m here for my baby-boo,” just like poor old Tailypo, but with no stomach to gut this time.
12My grief has alchemized into a Mount Eerie song, the sad one that moans, “when real
death
enters the house, all poetry is dumb.” I’d love to stop, but the time between now & death & our
next meeting is thick indeed. In deed, we agreed to not incarnate as human boys anymore,
but nothing has ever truly been under our control. I can read this all out to you & explain why
I chose each & every word, but I refuse to be any authority on its meaning. The only time
I
ever know what I am is when someone else tells me how my poetry made them feel. I love you
the most because you said, “it made me certain I exist.” It’s sundown now & the
dobhar-chú skulks back into my bed, whining about how we’re both widowers because some
man thought it fair to preserve the beautiful minds we made love to in formaldehyde
& water. For future minds to marvel in natural science museums
at the petri dish
of an extinct way of thinking.
13V – Transfiguration
Like a 15th century werewolf witch trial in Switzerland or setting fire to Gethsemane
’s olive trees dating back to 1092 AD, insurance refuses to subsidize your medication on account
of lycanthropy being a preexisting condition. The phonebook promised this is a no-kill
shelter but I’m starting to doubt, I’m starting to think we should do like mutts & scamper off.
Complete prescription: Dilaudid (for chronic pain), Levetiracetam (for occasional
convulsions), Atenolol (for cardiac arrythmia), Clomipramine (for the gnashing, scratching,
howling), Ketamine (to tranquilize during full moons). ‘Til we run out, I hold a PhD in
veterinary, prying your snout open with the forceps of my fingers like Moses parted the mother-
fucking ocean, chucking pills past your Adam’s bullet. Clutch shut for 60 seconds so you
can’t regurgitate. I know you’re nauseous, baby, but that’s just the 12 years of self-asphyxiation
talking. That’s just that thick hand curved by cruelty that banged your titanium muzzle
against a water bowl & watched you salivate your own sick. Your tag still reads: breed – Bitch,
we can’t claw it off. In the comic book adaptation of your life, you’re swarmed by
serrated
speech bubbles in every panel, GRRR! & GROWL! & HRRNGH!, backcountry onomatopoeia
cut out with a chainsaw, stinging like hornets. RATTLE RATTLE, you never take
more than ten steps without pausing, so used to the jerk of chains tripping you. Yeah, work
that Lucifer-getting-decapitated-by-Gabriel angle, baby. Therapy is just another term
for gentrification, making us middle-class-passing but the middle-class still wants to tear us
down
14so it can erect more state hospitals. The undertaker saw me digging you out of your
grave,
now there’s a warrant out for our arrest. I, too, wanted to believe that you were in a better place,
but good old Black Shuck did me a solid, let me know that what they’d done to you,
it was ferrying you to Hell. Evidence: the family photograph on your tombstone has your face
sliced out of it. “Olly olly oxen free,” your parents cry, yet explaining to their neighbors
that you’re dead is still easier than admitting that like any victim of child abuse you coped by
trans-
forming into a werewolf once a month. Now you’re like SCP-173, if I’m not watching
you you’re snapping someone’s neck, but, baby, don’t even apologize, you’re my emotional
support
animal & I’d be crazy for real without your lips cracking my collarbone every night.
Lean back, breathe, I’ll wash your feet with rosewater & silver through every breakdown, carve
the Rock of Agony out of our twin-size mattress. Still remember how it hurt the first time
you were told to shut the hell up? We both agree screaming therapy is the only placebo
for cohabiting with all the shit our hoarder-trauma keeps. Are you into blood-play? Can I
bite your wrist, listen to your blood cuss, so sweet, like I never can to everyone I hate?
Testosterone literally makes you hotter, you know, your skin sweating while the AC
blasts
55 °F. We’re post-post-post-traumatic: post-remembrance, post-integration – we can’t remember
15& we can’t integrate. Anger, after all, is to sadness as pork intestines are to baloney,
& we really, really prefer to feast raw. Maybe turning into a werewolf once a month is just
letting off a bit of cognitive-dissonance-steam, letting your wounds clot for once
Personally,
I wouldn’t mind being displayed in a Cabinet of Curiosities somewhere in Europe, but I
understand
you need at least 10 miles of woodland to run around & howl at the moon. Remember
when
a video of you yelling expletives at a statue of António Egas Moniz went viral on YouTube
& we felt famous enough to expect a call from Oprah, sweet sympathies like Truddi
Chase
earned? Online you’re like a piñata at a bachelor party, everyone gets to swing at your papier-
mâché
guts, opens their gullets wide to receive your cortisol salt. Pop Quiz: how do we safely
navigate people’s irrational reactions to our natural human emotions so we aren’t jailed
or institutionalized or killed? Don’t answer, honey, it’s rhetorical. Maybe it’s the veggies
we never ate as kids, maybe it’s that we were never properly housebroken, maybe
it’s our love for low-budget horror flicks where nobody listens to the one sane guy
in the group, but, baby something’s definitely wrong with us – &, yes, I know my only frame
of reference is my parents’ expectations, so don’t get smart with me. Come Autumn’s
harvest moon, we’re resorting to the dissociative anesthesia I purloined, circa my last forced
16institutionalization. WARNING: known side-effects include: sensory deprivation,
sensory overstimulation, hallucinations, derealization, body dysphoria, analgesia, mania, &
amnesia.
“Fuck it,” you snarl, nails already elongating, pupils dilating into tiny red giants. Four
minutes before you attain divinity, your halo slips down to your throat, choking you like
the hideous collar your bastard father left you with. But I’m prepared this time, hack it off
with my canines & swallow your long, long howl with my tongue.
17VI – Report From 06/20/2016 @ 11:50 PM; Incident: Disappearance
>what did you see?
the others hand him over to the police but not me. i lodge his howitzer fist into my salton sea,
go fishing. check my phone for new texts every night. (being left on read is better than not
being read at all.) for weeks the news sighs in relief: they caught him just in time,
speculate
about his mental health: “is there a history of aggression?” “does he
hear voices?” i thought “post-traumatic” meant being post-the-trauma, not more
bullhide belts & john hopkins. (not parents / caretakers / abusers still). first name:
ground-zero. last name: win. i warned him against being too ambitious, thinking he
could end an eon of intergenerational trauma with sloppy acts of rebellion.
(settle for homewrecker.) “i’m never having kids.” it’s not that easy. (settle
for schoolyard bully.) what doesn’t kill you, unfortunately, becomes you.
>what did you hear?
“fuck off!” “eat shit!” “i’ll kill you!” – the echolalia of every abuse survivor. ruth white
channeling baudelaire’s wraith. raphael’s horn blaring our favorite weepies song:
18“somebody loved.” a palmistry session: his girdle of venus like a reverse fault, laboring
the himalaya into extinction; his sun line obliterated completely by the burn scars.
while googling butterfly bandages, i saw someone’s self-harm cuts & made a horrifying
discovery about him. he did tell me he’s never had a relationship to his body that doesn’t
involve some kind of firearm. i fancied myself a firefighter / fire-breather: “i’m not
going to say we’ll always get along; i’m not sure anybody likes each other all the time;
but i don’t think your bad attitude makes you a bad person; & i like the person
you are right now.”
>what did you smell?
god of roadkill. hit-and-run scourge. patron saint of unmarked highway graves.
the nitroglycerine i baby-wipe from his cinereous face – so much nitroglycerin sweat,
like a still from andré de toth’s 1953 horror classic, “house of wax.” the twelve-rose suit
i hand-tailored for him now oxidizing. cardiac monitors flashing flat SMPTE bars each
time
god asks what he’s been up to. the news still recycling that shot of his mother
hitting him over the head. i understand being weary of romance after a lifetime of that.
19pocket full of pansies. now he dreams of gigantomachy (again with the cycles of violence),
a
mobius strip of the first adrenaline vaccine against doormat syndrome. he really hates
that people view me as his babysitter, not his boyfriend. i really hate
that people view him as only his bpd diagnosis.
>what did you taste?
i want us to take up as much space as the san andreas fault. i want my therapist
to stop asking me to relive my near-death-experiences. i see him when i black out –
“if you refuse to go down, it means you’re stupidly strong.” he’s neither a poet
nor a motivational speaker, yet this is the only advice i follow anymore. at the hospital i
can only move my arm & he’s only allowed to watch me through a glass, so we sign
‘til he’s falling asleep where he stands. the real problem is he was born at the cusp between
aries & taurus, while the mercury in his ribcage is constantly in retrograde. i wish i
could astral project into his past, grow up & around his calloused self-defense mechanisms.
the only time we kiss is when he dissociates, & it’s not fair
to him more than me.
20>what did you touch?
just his hand, officer.
just his hand.
21VII – Report From 07/15/2017 @ 1:45 AM; Incident: Anniversary
>who are you?
he’s been under house arrest for eleven days. i know now his parents are not kind
people.
that house is an autoclave. & he isn’t answering any of my texts. i stand
outside his window, wishing he’d see me. knowing it’d be the end of our relationship.
he’d never forgive me for caring enough to make him feel vulnerable.
is that a bpd thing? a ptsd thing? a disenfranchised-grief-for-yourself
thing? i’ve felt it, too – too many times to let go of him. but i’d
give
him up to teach him he’s not utterly unlovable. i wish i could tell him that
through the window.
my first name is crash test dummy. my last name
is
n/a. no family has claimed me.
my eyes are triturated eggshells. my hair is suffocated by my
black roots,
killing off the red dye he kneaded into me with his tender, wet fingers.
22i’m a footnote on his trial, not his heart.
is that enough information for you, officer?
>where are you?
let me be clear: we are not learning anything from this. this will not make us
stronger,
will not make us wiser. the posterchildren of this state’s re-education campaign
are still the same old pissed off bastards. i won’t say i hate him just ‘cause
some news anchor tells me to. drag me onto live tv & i’ll say i love him like
abraham
loved god when he agreed to kill his son. & when the police try to convince him
i’ve forgotten about him, he’ll spit in their faces like i spit on them now.
i know how this business profits. consent forms are just placebos. all his diagnoses
are legal acts of god. part-time special ed kids graduate into full-time prisoners
after the medical-industrial complex refuses to refill his prescription on
account
of his criminal record. updated criminal status: under police “protection.”
no, i can’t be paid to say he wanted to kill me. his hand on my neck
23is the safest i’ll ever feel.
>when are you?
i’ve spent the better half of my life trying to cram into a likable archetype. there are
stretch-
marks all over my body, censor bars transversing my eyes. the phone sensitivity jacked up
to 110. i guess it must be july of last year ‘cause i’m having another damn panic
attack
in the courthouse. i want to ask [ ] in the accused stand why i’m not dead.
i want to ask the judge if there’s a special sentence for the torture of a dependent
& if it’ll make me feel better, give me closure. but i know right then [ ] will never
explain
why i had to develop abnormally. living with complex ptsd means
picking fights with the nurses on nightshifts, means being re-traumatized
by each night terror, means never leaving the house without my best clothes on
so no can accuse me of looking mentally ill. trauma is messy, with no dosage limit
or best-before date. but grief – grief is simple: just the hesitation
to love anything enough to be hurt by its loss.
24>why are you?
my boyfriend’s faith in me is unintentionally guilt-tripping. † how his lips play my rib cage
like a xylophone. each kiss a note i did not know i could want to sing.
happy trauma anniversary, babe.
†
when the police come for him, i am in the bathroom
trying to stop blood gushing from my head
with the pressure of a water faucet.
tell him i am not running from him.
tell him i am destroying the evidence.
25VIII – The Last Time I See You
you’re taken away in a dog muzzle
your papa’s bullhide belts
bruising the brickwork of your neck
for one last alpha-to-omega-beatdown
eight dyads of oxygen orifices
spaced symmetrically across wrought iron
with a satin texture & rose gold finish
just enough leg room for the sun
to paper cut your lips
you could break someone’s arm with that
you could break someone’s arm & you do
mkultra reject 1groans
mkultra reject 2 remembers learning about the jugular in the police academy
the fossils of dinosaurs crushed into your petroleum tongue piercing
roar with you
werewolf gimmick by the mountain goats plays in my head
your rights are barked at you as flash cards
blood from your temple sketches a sad snailtrail in the pavement
siri says: you are on the fastest route to langley porter psychiatric institute
expected time of arrival: your seventeenth birthday
26mkultra rejects 1 & 2 look proud of their community service
manhandling kids beats picking up trash at parks any day
there’ll be so much paperwork with their names on it soon
there’ll be so many chances for promotion
to captain to chief to readmission to the cia
your hands are already handcuffed so next they go for your legs
they tie your waist to the tetherball pole in lieu of a real hospital bed
serrated speech bubbles teem with your expletives
in a language applied behavioral analysis taught us special ed kids to forget
the white noise of chains & keys is deafening anyway
we are told there’s a warrant for your arrest
you’re under arrest for breach of a medical contract
i. failing to appear at mandatory psychological evaluations
ii. failing to respect hospital curfew & personnel instructions
iii. failing to ingest the meds that keep you & everyone around you safe
iv. successfully upsetting a police officer with trashtalk
updated legal status: criminally insane
if it were both if us on the cool side of the magnifying glass
watching some poor fucker combust in broad high school playground
we’d be hooting & howling with sneering junkyard breed teeth
27awoooooo!
another stray with rabies for the padded paddy wagon
we’d be snapping photos with our cellphones
compare to see who got the best ones later
i wonder if i’ll regret not taking a photograph of this
you being twenty feet away is a serious problem
fall of the star high school running back plays in my head
your eyes are tigers ordered to leap through hoops of fire
leaping onto the circus crowd instead
let death by ten tranquilizer darts come with dignity
& they’re staring at me
remember sharing your meds whenever i lost my health insurance?
blink
remember dyeing my hair red in the johns hopkins bathroom ‘cause it made me look like less of a
wimp?
blink
remember teaching me to callous my skin with strike anywhere matches so it’d hurt less when
adults hit me?
blink
28remember betting on who’d be forcefully institutionalized first?
guess i owe you 30 bucks man
mkultra reject 2 bags your head
darkness is supposed to calm horses
plastic cones are supposed to protect dogs while they recover
if you weren’t psychotic before then you certainly are now
remember that time you told your hallucination to fuck off & it really did?
mkultra reject 1 snarls for the area to be cleared while phoning for back up
q: how many police officers does it take to dehumanize a high schooler?
a: the whole san francisco police force
there are twin guns in their holsters
i’m naively tempted to lunge for
but then what?
we can’t outrun or shoot all of humanity
if we’re lucky we’ll be committed to the same ward & see each other during group therapy
our homeroom teacher easily shepherds the students back inside
they’re already bored of your resilience
they’ll read the aftermath in all its gory detail online later
new survival mechanism acquired: pack mentality
29it hurts when i look away
it hurts & i always cry while good fighting dogs are finally slain in the ring
30IX – La Gargouille & el Nahual
la gargouille comes to life in the parking lot of a del taco, circa 4 am
raptor claws perched on the hood of a plundered 2012 chevrolet convertible
gnaws at the bottom corner of a redbull with tiny vampire bat fangs
frantic to lap up another smattering of wakefulness –
caustic ufo beam from the only functional streetlight
the hollywood of red-light districts
la gargouille unearths el nahual’s naked back with echolocation
serenades that buffet both skeletons like their tambourines in preschool
all the sorrow a gargoyle could thirst for
safe in the gullet
of this wannabe brujo
el nahual rolls yonder -
coddled little mama’s boy that fancied himself a monstrosity
- straight into the plagioclase wings that saint romanus assumed
he chopped off for good
31slobber like a wedding band, incisor to incisor
(for all his posh pedigree
the only french part of la gargouille is his kissing)
- tell me one of your secrets
- naci en el año del niño
- explains your temper
- pendejo.
hard like majorite garnet
no surprise when a reptile tail wags between his legs
skin-to-skin
el nahual remembers he has a human body
- ahora cuentame uno tuyo
32- mmm...
la gargouille grinds his tectonic plates & prepares
to climb the emerging picacho del diablo
el nahual howls: - awoooo
la gargouille answers: the click-clicking of desmodus
rotundus sharing a meal
- i like you ‘cause no one’s ever been happy just to see me before,
y’know?
these are their halcyon days
myths appropriated from their mixed ancestry -
the car is their cathedral
their ugliness apotropaic devices
to ward off worse demons
33- se a que te refieres.
el nahual shuts his eyes to dream
what do monsters dream of?
what more can they dream of, after telling their family
to go to hell
& driving away in their boyfriend’s convertible?
a safe bed to slink under
a warm closet to huddle in
a well-tended grave
with fresh flowers & fruit each evening?
- was it worth it? what’d you have to give up anyway?
la gargouille asks
between lovebites
7 mm wide & 8 mm deep
34- mi nombre. mi familia. mi college fund.
mi aparato reproductor.
- el diablo, por cierto, es pagarle a un gringo
para abrirte la piel.
35X – How to Fall in Love in a Psychiatric Hospital
give yourself permission to feel; break the ice during group therapy; tell him you like him; say “I
prefer the term ‘magpie’”; celebrate like it’s your birthday on each anniversary of a past suicide
attempt (it IS your birthday); ask for permission before touching someone; ask others to ask
permission before touching you (yes, even from the nurses & doctors, yes, even when they ignore
you); tell him you’d like to get to know him better; when someone tells you they’re an
android/angel/undercover smile & listen to what they have to say; write poetry about your
hallucinations; forget about when you might be released; look directly into the lens when your
photograph is taken; infodump; when the hospital refuses to continue his testosterone treatment
tell him you love men with soft features & curves; when the hospital agrees to resumes his
testosterone treatment tell him you also love men with sharkskin & a stubble; give yourself
permission to be in pain; make a habit out of checking your pulse; imagine you’re muslim buddhist
jewish shinto wiccan & discuss with a believer all the beautiful things you’ve learned from your
faith; decide what animal you want to be in your next life; tell him you love his homebrewed
undercut & lightning scar tattoos & body tics & the things he says in his sleep; when you do hold
someone hold them like a vaccum-sealed ziploc bag; bury something after each crying session to
give yourself closure; when someone asks if they’re making sense always answer “yes”; be in
conversation with your pain; brainstorm how you’d intervene positively in your own past moments
of crisis; roleplay fantasy scenarios where the good guys always win; tell everyone your life story;
tell him you’d love to kiss his cigarette-scarred lower lip; decorate your name wristband; spend
your manic days building things you can feel proud of when the crash descends; spend your
dissociative days in deep meditation over nature/colors/the universe/anything but the human
condition; tell him you want to be his emergency contact person; try out other inmates’ stimming
36techniques; complain in groups about the newest intern; brag & laugh over the fucked up side
effects of your meds; tell him this is the steadiest you’ve ever felt in your life.
37REFERENCES
Brown, Jericho. The Tradition. Copper Canyon Press, 2019.
Chen, Chen, and Brown, Jericho. When I Grow up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities.
First edition., BOA Editions, Ltd., 2017.
Clark, Tiana. I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018.
Espinoza, Joshua J., et al. Subject to Change: Trans Poetry and Conversation. First Sibling Rivalry
Press edition., Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017.
Gibson, Andrea. The Madness Vase: a Collection of Poetry. 2nd ed., Write Bloody Pub., 2012.
Phi, Bao. Sông I Sing: Poems. 1st ed., Coffee House Press, 2011.
Pico, Tommy. Nature Poem. First U.S. edition., Tin House Books, 2017.
Pico, Tommy. Junk. First U.S. edition., Tin House Books, 2018.
Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi. Bodymap. Mawenzi House, 2015.
Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: an American Lyric. Graywolf Press, 2014.
Tolbert, TC, and Peterson, Trace. Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics.
Nightboat Books, 2013.
Vuong, Ocean. Night Sky with Exit Wounds. Copper Canyon Press, 2016.
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