TORIA N. BAEZ
Slotted
dipping our eyelids in one another's goop we felt so playful.
kissing chins, eyelashes comingling we felt the rhythmic jelly from our sound booths bounce, so playful.
circles dotting
moving around one another like magnets until they change from opposing into one another and the pupils lengthen outward and the eyes become and an eye and the chuckles that shook the jelly and bounced us and our freckles and our loosened joints just stopped.
like an underpass our eye unit was transported below us, above us, into tunnels everywhere is us the reality that i would see the you unit in my night once the eye became eyes and the lids shut over them I would see the you unit so clearly so dark that I would awake the next day never knowing the lid closed nor that you were on top of me. that i had lost an eye and that pureness we associate with
lost an eye and that perkiness we associate with lost an eye
that i had lost an eye as it was no longer mine but ours and that commingling unsettled me so much i wished i could sever my own sight.
tinting my sight
leaving me lost in a rural playfield of drunken teens.
sickened to now call this home.
An early dinner
it sat and watched
at the rim and at the echoed at the trim tip
it watched us
and discussed us watching.
mother chirped like a slither in through
and out of
but
the tongued weighed it down.
pressed the chatter of shards, of villainous shards into a lilac
and it spread into a little lily
morph
ed beauty
from a
morphed
mother.
All the
while its
origin is a
rusted tongue
stamp
Weight
ing down like
some
dominant.
masculine on
the table.
Our
dinner table.
my teacher tells me
________________
internalized as
to put it another way
I am forever showjumping on the outskirts of the track creating my own semi spheres
stopping just about the elliptical just before it ellipsis
Bout the moment it becomes
leaping to point to the point of the sphere and I am above the track
looking down on the patch of synthetic ground for which my heals have been turned flat and
forbidden from
my feet have films around the entirety of its base like one flat winged plate
I am hovering over other world. The other world. I'm the interior. the image the nonexistent.
And in the real the ball is being passed and the spine and others are gently folding on the soil
unaware that they are lying on the undecayed
Held in a suspension that this "grass" won't age
But I hover with my new feet
why can't we graduate
we this mass now a mass a grouping many boarder houses or conceptions of
virginity are encasing the real and acting as the image in the un
yet this is we and
the i of the group is yanked down
and rumbled through and past the soil
down to the fourth floor story of an old ancient high school
i am asked to explain the origin of some other
like a cellar in my throat there is a coolness in the evening of my gorge
and it tells me to remove my clothing creating a path toward the window and out
of my own volition I knot each article
until i am at the glass, naked
levantada
I am on the tarmac
My grandfather is lingering by the door wearing a cowboy's hat
I hear the women chirping in the distance
"eso es"
That's him mija, say hi
He loves your mother
His favorite
I am wearing a paleta lime tank, I am meaty, I am six
This is a photograph
My brother has drawn devil ticks on me and has connected my brows
I am on the tarmac holding this photograph in my hand
He's hiding behind the black vehicle
he looks over once seeing his own mija far away on the heated turf. he tells me that he didn't mean to shoot the man. that he had been followed home from the bar. that he never knew him. that's where the story waivers.
black ardor rises.
y si llegaste a casa you would have invited him in and we would have made him our own.
no viniste a casa another location. porque no preguntaste? it invites those happenings
all of this is being said between the three dimensional plane
of hot black
i am lifted off the tarmac and brought indoors. they feed me slim strips of meat well-done
I: but none of it is actually funny? None of it is meant to make us laugh?
Two of us
One plastic
One flesh
The house was slanted left, two floors long
The house would wake at twelve, one plan we made
I'd slip out my flesh and replace the space with plastic.
I'd look over the mound at my mother, still.
I'd walk from the second down the slant to the first where we'd meet. He told us the rules of the game. How everything was hidden here. We had all night. We had the whole night. To find these damn toys.
I wouldn't tell myself how
I'd rather be the plastic, how My flesh should be upstairs next to mother mound, how
The plastic doll lying next to my mother marking my place should be downstairs playing
with the boys searching for her friends.
The flesh girl playing in the night
The flesh girl playing in the night
When was it okay for the flesh girl to play in the night?
these materials never find us
these materials
save us
these materials lead us to the source
to the other toys
to the rubber balls hidden in
refrigerator
the three of us are dispersed across the two floor flats. we travel from double basements to second floors and shuffle in a hurry looking for the toys before two. we don't say it but we're tired. how do we tell him we're tired? how do I tell him I'm more tired than my brother? that I speak on behalf of me, my flesh, my plastic figurine, and my brother? that he cannot have my brother? that my brother is my brother? that he needs to let us go to bed? that the plastic can't have it better than me? that my mother is standing at the top of the staircase holding the three foot tall barbie with blonde hair and flat feet, and she is looking down at me, scowling.
ven a dormir.
Toria N. Baez is a Latinx poet and painter. She currently lives in Urbana, IL as a graduate student studying Art Education at UIUC.