Marcelo Castillo: Drown
Your tongue glides on my chest like a burnt match
skating in a urinal with one long hiss until it sinks.
You sink. We are wrestling under water in a river where the sun
is broken like a dried yellow leaf under a leather boot, and at the bottom, the light
is a fist muscling its way through the waves.
We don’t even remember what we look like anymore down there.
And you say, I want something in secret.
I want to climb down a tree in secret. I want to stand up
in front of a crowd and whisper a speech in secret….
I am a nail sharpened on your back like a knife on a whetstone.
This is the version without water.
You are a fleshless door. You’re disgusting.
You taste like liver and car batteries;
you are filling my head with guitars whose strings are a twitching knot of snakes in heat
tying each other tighter until even they can’t unwind.
One of us will need to rise for air soon.
The other will be responsible for pulling both bodies back to the bottom and dressing
them again.
Nothing is interesting up there; I’ve come from up there.
There’s only a thick pack of cards on a table. There’s only a black smear
that makes up a finch against a white wall picking
at a wrapper speckled with garnish.
Everything up there is useless and broken. It’s been so long since I’ve been made
fine and broken.
Let’s continue this drowning until we remember what we look like.
This is my entire occupation.
Hallucination
My brother sleeps in his hospital
bed unmoved by the quiet.
I imagine that from his stapled
wound where they entered
to remove his bruised spleen
like a shriveled green child
from a Caesarean,
that a pair of goldfinches
might shoulder their way out.
And if they spill
out into the stillness of the room
covered in mucus—
the word goldfinch would thump
on everyone’s tongue.
If their feathers hit the floor
louder than a knell,
then we can all consider
prayer to be a removal of self.
It is simple: outside in the hall
the air whines through the vents
while inside we are careful
not to speak of the beaks
pointing towards the quiet.
MARCELO CASTILLO is an MFA candidate at the University of Michigan and a Canto Mundo Fellow. He was born in Zacatecas, Mexico, and earned a BA from Cal State Sacramento. He has served as artist in residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and has held residencies at the Squaw Writers Workshop and the Vermont Studio Center. In collaboration with C.D. Wright, his translations of the Mexican poet Marcelo Uribe’s latest collection of poetry is forthcoming and with Robert Hass, he co-edited The Squaw Review 2011. He was also a finalist for the 2013 Theodore Roethke Prize. He lives in Ann Arbor with his wife Rubi.
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