Category: Andrés Cerpa

by Andrés Cerpa

How often I’ve leafed down Broadway, my face half hidden

& found the night to be another failed suture—

seven miles of heel touching heel, scar cleaning scar,

as the wind frisks my hands for crumbs. I have loved this city

in ways imaginable, learned not to speak when speaking,

to scry its palms. Yet too soon the gulls slit

the borrowed night into a thin blue ether: the blank pages

of a journal forgotten—the middle chapter,

our ghosts. I was safe as a quelled dream in the dark.

from Bicycle in A Ransacked City: An ElegyFind more by Andrés Cerpa at the library

Copyright © 2019 Andrés Cerpa
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Alice James Books.

by Andrés Cerpa

I say goodnight, smile, walk out the door then sit on the hill

above, & facing my father’s house, smoke another

spliff & watch his, then my mother’s, windows go dim.

I believe that maybe in the streetlight which flickers & reflects

off the stop sign, at the plateaued road between us,

a flutter, a baseball card in a wheel, will conjure a former self

to slip from my old window, to walk here & sit with me awhile,

with his shoulder to my shoulder

as he takes a few drags, sighs then says, I’m going back home.

I wouldn’t say things gets better. I’d say, We learn to live,

that, human beings can get used to anything.

But he already knows this somewhere, though he’ll have to

throw bottles off rooftops, piss himself & sleep in the snow,

wake to his corruptible body & shame,

withdraw, close one hand around his father’s throat

like a nail you’d hang a mirror on, as the right hand hammers

the Sheetrock & his mother tries to calm him,

crying, blaming herself & holding her palms to her son’s cheeks

as he steps back, wipes his eyes until the Sheetrock damps

against his veins. He’ll have to walk

alone for years to thaw the ash & numb.

from Bicycle in A Ransacked City: An ElegyFind more by Andrés Cerpa at the library

Copyright © 2019 Andrés Cerpa
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Alice James Books.

by Andrés Cerpa

She, no one, can hold my blood like a trembling mirror in which the stars can weep,

& therefore, I walk the city unknown. I’d like to vow my silence & be done.

I can’t. I keep a belief in salvation,

in a hand reaching gently out. The click of dice in lamplight, a chewed cigar,

& my friends raising guns to the air on a rooftop,

painting the sky with their anger. The wolves’ communion, my death,

my box of ashes in a pause of wind. I don’t wanna be holy,

I want my breath to flock & spiral like birds,

but like a girl, so far from the ocean, whistling a hollow-point into the wheat fields

at twilight, as she watches her song carry, I think, Where does it end?

Powerless in love, I dreamt the deep shade of Berlin; that distance was my savior,

yet I still wanted to hold the birdcage & dwindling song: my father’s chest,

& hold my mother’s strength, to be there when she weeps. I wanted another life,

one in which my love could save them. Years after our love had ended, in its first form,

an old lover asked if I could speak, if I could finally let a woman in,

& then I remembered how she began to shatter plates as her hands trembled,

when I had no words but a bottle’s silence or shatter. We broke

everything that night, & cared deeply at the end. We thought about their beauty,

about the waste, the money we’d have to spend.

The language of our anger was frail.

It was the cheap nourishment of forgetting, not the hand, the thumb moving in a slight circular

motion to ease & say, I’m ready.

There is a language I can’t take back, a rib cage cleaned by the wolves & scattered,

a tint of red in a snow which lays my love distant. I remember taking my father’s throat

in my left hand, while my right hesitated, made snow of the Sheetrock beside him.

from Bicycle in A Ransacked City: An ElegyFind more by Andrés Cerpa at the library

Copyright © 2019 Andrés Cerpa
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Alice James Books.

by Andrés Cerpa

How so soon after the funeral, there was laughter, & the children,

dressed in reverence, began to play, though they knew to hide some joy

while those closest to death waited for a moment that never came.

No eulogy is enough. No yellow lily on a chestnut coffin or fistful of earth.

No ritual. Nothing lasts, not even sorrow,

which is the iron clasp on the coffin that rings like a canary

after the singing. The bird brought into the light & the cage door open.

Tomorrow, it will be filled by the clean hands of morning,

so unlike the miner’s soot-black hands

that lifted the yellow breast to his lips to say, I’m sorry,

you weren’t meant for this. But like a childhood,

the cage door must close. The anarchy of smoke, the small fires

our ancestors kneeled toward to warm themselves, to stare into the distance

that had no border but the streaked gold that divided the land from sky.

Tomorrow. Black lace beneath a white linen shirt, the dream of death

which is hollowed in darkness. In working the thread of desire

the bodies become, for a slight moment, not separate, but dispersed.

The trees become silver when the snow descends,

& in that blur against the branches, a wolf steps into a buried trap,

yelps into the hourglass. But the leaf-light of late August comes.

The arthritic branches will gather sap. The children whittle them down

with the knives of their fathers & the patience of a woman, not yet showing,

looking into herself as the blue morning peers through a window.

At once, all things compile a palpable sense of presence & ruin.

Pine needles fall like rain, their scent’s ascension in September’s cathedral.

from Bicycle in A Ransacked City: An ElegyFind more by Andrés Cerpa at the library

Copyright © 2019 Andrés Cerpa
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Alice James Books.

by Andrés Cerpa

she washed my hands with rosewater: empty cathedral:

beach town in winter: snaps above the smoke rings

as the hearts unfurl: last week’s flowers hung

on a doorknob: drying: brittle: the sparks of their petals

on wormwood: in the mirror slow as motes in a window

she said I can’t stay: the thumbprint of her voice

from somewhere deep in the morning’s green-gray sea:

brush fire: breeze in the pines: her bare steps

in a doorway: sand in the linen: sand in my palms:

from Bicycle in A Ransacked City: An ElegyFind more by Andrés Cerpa at the library

Copyright © 2019 Andrés Cerpa
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Alice James Books.