‘American Dream’ and Other Poems
By Miguel Barretto García
Tantric painting from Rajasthan, 20th century. Watercolor and/or gouache on salvaged paper. Collection of Franck André Jamme. The Three Gunas (Conditions of Existence), depicted as three minimalist candles: Tamas (black): Inertia, darkness, heaviness, and resistance; Rajas (red): Passion, activity, movement, and change; Sattva (white): Harmony, purity, balance, and light.
Image description: Three squat abstract shapes painted black, red, and white, respectively, with vertical “candle wicks,” lined up in a row horizontally against a blank paper ground.
American Dream
The weight of the grocery bag is the weight
of a child at Immigration Camp. Flat and wide
the shadow not shrinking. The body remains
as body remains and here, a seed grows
eclipsing the once and great American Dynasty.
Indeed, I am the America
in my Target bag, the milk and honey
Bingo Card in my Groupon. Fruits and vegetables
bruising. Everything I have here
I fight for. Dipped my fingers into a pocket.
A coin in the pocket. Loose change won’t
be enough. A bus ride home. A body
asleep at the back of the truck
is not enough. Yellow, purple, blue
clouds blush like two estranged lovers.
O, such an American tradition: lighting a Christmas tree
and wiring money for my sister’s surgery.
A body is a garden of lavender-scented soap
and violet skin. I have an ugly sweater
knitted with betadine and gauze.
Mama never stopped saying—
Do not presume the smallness of our fists.
They are made from typhoons.
Our feet are callused and caked after
days walking the mountains barefoot.
What was soft and supple skin
was swept away by monsoons and the dream
of false advertisement. The snow is cruel and rain
was a gathering of children dancing.
Christmas is a wish to return to childhood.
Tantric painting from Rajasthan, Bikaner, 2002. Watercolor and/or gouache on salvaged paper. Collection of Franck André Jamme.
Image description: A central vertical oval depicting at once the "Shiva linga," ancient Indian phallic emblem, and the undifferentiated negative space of the shunya, the absolute void of Divine Consciousness. Painted deep blue-black, the oval bleeds a transparent stain of bright pink, like a river overrunning its banks, onto the paper ground.
Free Body Culture
The smell of damp green grass on a pale spring.
Palms held together, as if in prayer. The incense
of musk from male bodies. Lavender scent
from newly trimmed pubic hair. There are women
whose bare fruits they leave swollen for the public.
Why would anyone care? There are no serpents
to tempt our carnal desires. The variously sized
phalluses are no better than the mushrooms
my grandmother used to forage. Bellies across
various stages of the digestion process. And skin,
of course, mostly white. Lone is the brown body
lying on a wet towel. I smell cigarette in the after
sex. I had a baby’s scent, my fuckbuddy said.
My body, a bildungsroman cycling around
the negative space of a belly button. I circled
the pond water with my finger. It was wet.
Aftermath of a rainy day is one finger, then two.
Deepen your fist. The monsteras by the window.
The monsters in my head. I danced around
my rent-controlled flat while clothes were left
to dry. Felt so seen among the plants
I raised during the pandemic. I am dirty amongst
cutlery and teacups left naked in the sink.
But they can take it. The smell of thick
massaman curry. The uncut dick I ate last night.
Gooey white stain on the kitchen towel. Last night
was fun when we cooked together. We ate all
our stories up. We were still hungry even after
sex in bed. Aluminium foil from midnight kebab.
Youth we so desperately held onto our smiles.
The thought of botox at thirty-five no longer taboo.
Plenty of rice queens, heavy in techno music.
Ket lingering in our veins. The dungeon club
That we went a week ago. Glory be to the glory holes.
Glorious were our Erasmus days on the beach.
Your naked body is nonbinary. Multitudes of you
contained in singular imperfection. You haven’t
finished the book you were reading. We were
naked when we have revealed our boyhood
fears. Warm Berliner Deutsch rolling from mouth
to mouth resuscitation. It’s always humid
after rain. White skin glistening in this oasis
of a city, my body is a lone star. The scar
on my left knee from biking. Curls on everyone’s
pubes giggle during every passing breeze.
I giggle when you’re just there. Everyone didn’t
give a fuck that their liver spots are growing.
The many rings of a tree. Bodies, their fake tans.
We all pile up as sandcastles one day.
Tantric painting from Rajasthan, 20th century. Watercolor and/or gouache on salvaged paper. Collection of Franck André Jamme.
Image description: On the top half of the vertical page floats a square painted in hues of Ultramarine and Prussian blue. Against this blue ground, flying in an all-over composition like jostling atoms or shooting stars, are countless, tiny, white, fine-line arrows, moving and pointing in every direction at once. Jamme described this painting as a meditation on "the endless dance of energy."
Benediction
My days I live inside a glass
one-bedroom studio with windows
thick as the rolodex of anonymous
hook-ups. Last night I was gifted
with a hickey. How the bodies
that entered through the door
Leave a piece of me. Leaving me
a piece of dried leaf. It will be
spring next month and my thighs
will still have bite marks of the beast
and finger scratches by my hands.
That my body was once my mother’s
wound I think as much while
I’m in the shower singing
a requiem song. Where is my father
in those marble-white eyes?
That I stand at the corner of a bar
is no coincidence. A performance
art. One of many Saint Sebastian
portraits. Arrowed by someone’s
fleeting desire. I’ve read the tarot cards.
My fate remains. The poison
fruit I bit. The seed I planted
bore a sapling in the shape of a pair
of hands that used to belong to
my boyhood. I’ve been searching
for that boy inside the ruins
of photos. That smile that refuses to
break the way a branch refuses to
let go of a bird’s nest during a storm.
These days I lay naked on my couch
with only a thin blanket to cover
my womb. One day my boy will
be a boy who will live inside their make
believe tepee draped with night, dotted
with stars and comets. One day,
There will no longer be children made
into saints. They will only be children.
Miguel Barretto García is a queer poet and spoken word performer. Their poems have been published in Poetry Northwest, RHINO Poetry, harana poetry, Wildness, Magma Poetry, Rattle, among others. Originally from the Philippines, they are currently living in Saint Louis, Missouri.
*
Tantric Paintings, 20th-century, abstract meditation aides painted by anonymous artists from Rajasthan, based on 17th-century illustrations from Indian religious texts. Collected by Franck André Jamme (1947-2020): "The images were discovered by French poet Franck André Jamme in 1970 while rummaging through the catalogs of a Parisian art gallery. He became so transfixed by these esoteric artworks that in the 1980s, he traveled to India to find their origins. In 1985, his quest nearly killed him in a bus accident whilst on the Tantric trail across the deserts of Rajasthan. He suffered a series of comas, spent three weeks in a Parisian hospital and six months at home in a hospital bed, and found his mind as broken as his body, unable to live with the memory of what he considered a painful failure. After a long and painful recovery, his obsession with the artworks led him back to India, where he earned the trust of tantrikas—the authentic practitioners of the Tantric tradition—and set out to better understand their meditative art form." (More info: https://www.themarginalian.org/2011/12/06/tantra-song-siglio/)
Though “Christmas is a wish to return only to childhood”, what innocence do children have left? Three poems by Miguel Barretto García.