j o h n m c h á v e z

j o h n m c h á v e z
	Body, Silhouette, Anchor (1994) Self-Portrait in Cut Paper The Spoils & the Wreckage

Body, Silhouette, Anchor (1994)

Tonight, the Checker Taxis are in a perpetual arriving & the police are buttoned into alleys. The radio reels back, fevers through my room its only easy song.

At last my love has come along / my lonely days are over /& life is like a song. O, Etta James, etc. I’ve no stamina to avoid the drag show anymore. Truth is, I’m far more removed from God’s colonization of the New West than Acacia Park will ever be.

At this callous hour, won’t you lay bare my body’s tenor, its vehicle to quiet the room’s neurotic clack? Won’t you open a door in my side & enter the autism of night?

Self-Portrait in Cut Paper

Evening is a syntax of water towers. Mostly my body sunsets red-beige; my mornings, sunrise grey-orange. Afternoon? A bouquet of browning crepes & cream sauce. The evening holds me umbilically in its hand, dull-lit and uncounterfeitable

____________________________

The sweet lyric of November thickens the air—rain absent, even when the world is dividing—rain absent, even when the city slowly dispenses

Morning is a waterfall of light. Mostly my body is a terrible schoolyard of children’s laughter & a thrashing set of swings. Darkness dissipates from the ripening sun. The light holds me there in its hand, a dust of ambulances ululating in the afterdusk

____________________________

The thick lyric of August sweetens the air—rain absent, even when the world is bittersweet—rain absent, even when the façade coyly disappears

The Spoils & the Wreckage
	I’m before, I’m always, I’m never— yet razing the corners of myself, I wade far out in the flowering dusk. I write something disappeared in me. I write the word: comfort. I’ve no lexicon for the word: comfort. I’m an inconsequential sky, a waterbug, a ravine, a misspent wind, a bird thrashing in the traveler’s undiscovered country. In this high-rouge morning, I’m love made near a quiet road. I’ve grown into a garden of shadows. I’m pliable, an imprudent dream—let us sleep then so our bodies will arrive like sunrise.
next
JOHN CHÁVEZ is a PhD student in poetry at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Conduit, Xantippe, GRIST, Puerto del Sol, Portland Review, The Laurel Review, Notre Dame Review, and Copper Nickel among others. He is the author of the chapbook Heterotopia, published by Noemi Press in 2004, and co-author of the chapbook I,NE: Iterations of the Junco, published by Small Fires Press in 2009.

a l i c e b l u e t e n

I S S N 1 5 5 9 - 6 5 6 7