under stirring gnarled twinkling lights, the little room, the little poems, under goddamn bushes and adobe trailers, what’s desire or need or silence, a gut’s un-flitting storm? Look, I flinch when the wind comes. Listen to friction, it is treacherous, a platform leveling the mind, wooden and shapeshifting with each experience. A horror movie with multiple endings. I lock the doors. Hide upstairs. I listen to every creak, watch a shadow display its crooked skeleton, towering over my guise, it whispers to me: you let it crack you open, you want it to pill // pull everything out of you. one hard slice, one furious pop, and you’re nourishing the greediest parts you hid: sickle tongue, engine teeth. What climbs out is the beast, the torrent of antlers, sawdust, and fur, blood next, sure, always blood, guilty blood, undeniable blood, loud blood, pooling at the feet of the captor and the conspirator, that lives inside the hole you dug up to resurrect, they feast on all the dead bad parts of yourself you buried. Now look, goddamn, the newness, the old, the past, the future, right now, all scratching at once to get a glimpse of the mess, to witness the creature and its evolution, stretching alive and glowing, my god, the pulse.
Mateo Perez Lara is a queer, non-binary, Latinx poet from California. They received their M.F.A. in Poetry as part of the first cohort to graduate from Randolph College’s Creative Writing Program. They are an editor for Block Chronicles and a Communications Specialist for Nectar Digital Collaborative. They have a chapbook, Glitter Gods, published with Thirty West Publishing House. Their poems have been published in EOAGH, The Maine Review, and elsewhere.