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C.N.P Poetry 

  • Writer's pictureCathexis Northwest Press

maldiciones de odio y amor en los tiempos de mierda

By: Marcy Rae Henry



i’m writing her a poem about an alchemical tale


i was told in Egypt a scarab pushes


bolitas de mierda down the road


shitballs grow

the way snow sticks to snow

when the beetle has dealt with enough shit

midas-colored flies emerge and flit

away forgetting where they came from


to ward off maldiciones i’ll give her a blue-green scarab

that sat in my pocket while my body

floated in the Dead Sea the way a sprig floats in oil


***



cuando era joven people in charge talked


about una llamada de dios

and i’d lie on my side


as coyotes circled closer to the moonbright barrier


between sagebrush and asphalt

noting i had not been called


one nochebuena the first man flipped me upside down


while tree lights glowed like planets


he pounded on my back until a peppermint candy

lodged in my throat popped out


and then the night was good


***


pain is personal


the weight of loving


and being beloved


the way brujería is more personal than soap


amulets and sage


repetition is what keeps us together


pero ella no se nota


i’ve always had something stuck in my throat




 

Marcy Rae Henry is a Latina born and raised in Mexican-America/The Borderlands. She has lived in Spain, India and Nepal and once rode a motorcycle through the Middle East. Her writing and visual art appear in Hobart, Newcity, Thimble Literary Magazine, New Mexico Review and The Wild Word, among others. Her writing has received a Chicago Community Arts Assistance Grant and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship. Ms. M.R. Henry is working on a collection of poems and two novellas. She is an Associate Professor of Humanities and Fine Arts at Harold Washington College Chicago.


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