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Mary Anne Rojas Poem
My mother worked hard in bed. She would dig herself out of men’s pockets like a miner.
Every man was a mine shaft; she always knew what she was looking for. My mother
always managed to pay for my school fieldtrips just like all the other mothers. I liked her
for this. The night before the zoo my mother told me to lie quietly and fall asleep. I
listened. I slept on the edge of our bed like a wrinkled quilt. I could hear them:
thick gulps of sweat pounding like a galloping horse. I remember the bed quaking like
the broken engine of an old car, the sound of grinding wood and chipped teeth. The
room started to smell of burning wax. Shadows of two bodies melting into each other. I
would close one eye. My mother’s legs stretched above his shadow like the reins of a
horse. I could smell her unknotting her lungs under this cowboy sweat, gripping his
knees on her hips for support. It reminded me of the movies, how cowboys
ride horses. I could hear their bones echoing through the mattress: frenetic, resilient,
and faceless. Their bodies tangling like grapevine. The next morning, the sheets were
damp like wet grass after a shower. And my mother wore her purse like a saddle
Copyright © Mary Anne Rojas | Year Posted 2011
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Mary Anne Rojas Poem
Amelia says that love is like an old Dominican couch, still wrapped in plastic, being
pushed off a thirty-three story project building and waiting at the bottom with buoyancy
to catch it. Patricia says love is like a ballerina, showing off how many times she can
twirl on a stage and then falling flat on her ass. Every one falls she tells me. But Paola
says it’s not like that at all. It’s like a pair of jeans that you wear so often, its starts to
rip between your inner thighs. You can sew them back, but they will never be the same.
My grandfather had a closet full of canvases and oil paint. He was a painter once. Every
family member owned one of his paintings. He walked around with paint brushes at the
tip of his fingers. Didn’t use them. Just sort of stroked everything he walked passed. He
was good at this, finding detours from the kitchen to the bedroom, avoiding the closet.
This is how it is with me. Love I mean.
Copyright © Mary Anne Rojas | Year Posted 2011
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Mary Anne Rojas Poem
You will refuse to admit
that the way he looks at you reminds you of a wedding dress:
something you cannot see yourself learning how to wear,
laced around your chest like a straight jacket;
he will have held you like that—
many times through the phone
you would have given him permission—all the time.
It was nice for a moment.
You will eat half of everything
promising him he can have the rest
no matter how far he is, all you want to do is share with him,
leaving an invisible body’s indentation beside yours.
You will sleep with your phone next to your ear,
as if his voice can crawl into you like a memory wrapped in bed sheets and telephone
wires.
On days you remember you think about him more than usual,
you will call him by his full name, reminding yourself he is an individual
leaving yourself out of the equation as if
your relationship is a math problem:
there is always a solution, but
this is ephemeral, erased text messages and
telling yourself your both staring at the same moon—we are that close, baby,
something time can only figure out on its own.
You will have difficulties explaining to your friends that
your closest kiss landed in Minnesota with a one way ticket and
roundtrips are for the ones who know how love back
“we prefer coffee and tea, please.”
You will have nightmares about vacations
constantly reminding you that happiness comes in pieces,
then you will smell his kiss through a computer screen
and remember why you have fallen into a moment’s time.
Copyright © Mary Anne Rojas | Year Posted 2011
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Mary Anne Rojas Poem
I like to pretend this is just another hand-me-down story by my grandmother,
another black and white 1950’s photograph tucked away in a shoebox,
that the first time
a glass of whiskey scorched through the cataract of his veins
never spilled onto my face like a test tube exhausted in blood,
saturating my cheekbone like a steam room and
dashing the walls of my chin into his knuckles
was just his way of telling me, “I just want to protect you.”
The second time was just a joke, I promise.
We were playing “pretend you were my wife”
Would you etch the contours of your fist
on the corner of my right eye like?
Making it harder for my peripheral vision to detect your next muscle.
Making it easier for you to see me inside out,
as if this whole time you were searching for my mother inside of me
“Yes, a little closer to the bone, would you?”
He left the shadows of his knuckles on my neck like a pearl necklace
“I could hear them contracting at night,
the bruises trying to find a blanket under my skin:
it gets cold when he is around.”
The third time was less painful.
My muscles were immune to his mood swings.
I didn’t flinch anymore.
My body was a dummy:
fearless and helpless.
I earned each swing like a dog treat, he said.
So the next fists became an epulotic agent for the bruise before and after it.
I expected them with good intentions like birthdays.
Felt them like panting flesh fixed in a coma.
This was normal.
By the end of the month,
my face was an ant farm,
overwhelming with caverns.
I would tear from each cleft as though
my face was a strangling sponge,
after another striking dinner.
Copyright © Mary Anne Rojas | Year Posted 2011
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