POEM OF THE WEEK: Rodney Gomez
Rodney Gomez
Calvarium
Do you know
that in Teotihuacan
families buried
their loved ones
under their homes?
They couldn’t bear
to unfasten
their own lightning.
Then I discovered
the elegant falsity
of believing the dead
can listen.
*
This toe is a plectrum.
Two breasts calcified
by mouths
stuffed with thorn.
Mother, where
have you unburdened
yourself?
Even now
the bone whistles
to quake the tar
from your body.
*
I slathered flour and lard
over my face
to summon the womb
that made me.
And clapper rails.
Your head was much
too big for my body.
I rattled around,
the invisible committee
beside me.
¿Todavía hablas Español?
I continue squawking.
And do you know?
Even the house’s joists
regret you.
*
The machete employs a doula.
But these sutures
have no origin.
A hole drilled in the head
where you slipped a scroll
professing your love.
But I betrayed your
turbulence.
*
Gorditas stacked
like sandstones.
Calabaza con pollo
y me vale la pena.
A smattering of Vitacilina
on your thighs.
How little I knew
about anchors or ballasts.
How to organize the till
or soak my feet
in Epsom.
I never learned to skin
nopalitos of their thorns.
I didn’t even know
I lacked a womb.
Rodney Gomez is a member of the Macondo Writers’ Workshop and the proud son of migrant farmworkers. He is the author of Citizens of the Mausoleum (2018), Baedeker from the Persistent Refuge (2019), and the chapbooks Mouth Filled with Night, Spine, and A Short Tablature of Loss. His work has appeared in Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, Blackbird, Pleiades, Denver Quarterly, and Puerto del Sol, among other journals. He is the recipient of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Prize from Northwestern University, the RHINO Editors’ Prize, the Gloria Anzaldúa Poetry Prize, and the Rane Arroyo Prize. He studied philosophy at Yale and earned an MFA from the University of Texas-Pan American. He works at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and reviews poetry for Latino Book Review.
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