Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán


rough

we sniff salts to move us back into consciousness.
give me the recipe for ammonium carbonate.
too rough, you said, in my hands,
even in bed too eager, left you sore where you didn’t want to be.
this baby born without lotion.
yours was a high class mixing.
mine, ghettos y barrios, people who’d never flown in a plane,
only knew this land. yours, a diplomat’s diaspora.
tus padres: modelos. your six languages? lose count, stumble with my few.
i trade you mango-wet kisses by the projects.
roaches scatter.
you see the world laid out wide before you.
i see stones in the path, am checked for weapons at the gate.
you float on through, emptied oysters at your lips,
pearls and abalone around your neck.
my soon-to-be-revoked passport.
you are always arriving, and i always waiting for departure.
comment on my way of eating,
my inarticulate manner of speech.
you shift red to my blue at this station, Doppler effect.
hurtle life. i am surprised our trains do not collide.


Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán is the author of Antes y después del Bronx: Lenapehoking, winner of the New American Press Chapbook Contest; and the editor of an international queer Indigenous issue of Yellow Medicine Review: A Journal of Indigenous Literature, Art, and Thought.
 
 
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