{"id":260068,"date":"2024-01-10T07:05:00","date_gmt":"2024-01-10T12:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/?p=260068"},"modified":"2024-01-03T12:10:32","modified_gmt":"2024-01-03T17:10:32","slug":"two-poems-by-esteban-ismael","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/two-poems-by-esteban-ismael\/","title":{"rendered":"In America, I Am Whole Wheat Bread"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

My America Is Bagels<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
My America is skin. Hide. The red\nhair periodically in my mustache.\nThe sun\u2019s inability to burn me\npast the color of bread,\nwhole wheat. My America\r\nis Guatemala. El salvador.\nMy America is Chile. My America\r\nis unsure whether to pronounce\nChile like the country\nor the admonishment you give\nthe child misbehaving\non the front porch. Chile<\/em>. The Texas home\r\nmy great-great-grandfather built\nto be burned down\r\nin my lifetime. The cemetery where\nhe is buried with all the others\nwith Mexican last names\nin that flea bite of a town.\nMy America is living almost\r\nevery day of my life with a sea of white\n& yellow lights called Tijuana, a crack\r\nin my bedroom window. My America\r\nis the hard stone my grandmother\r\nwrapped in a baby blanket\n& hid in a Phoenix\nbasement. My America is the glowing\nblack waters beside Detroit\u2019s midnight\r\nlights: paradoxical beauty, tide, swift\r\ncurrent. My America is any place\nwhere someone docked their boat\r\nin the sand saying, This\r\nis mine now. Minha. Mijne. Mine.\n\n<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Once<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
We will love each other only once. The word for this is cathecting<\/em>, but we\u2019re young still & high on our own diction, leaving those words sharp with meaning back in the classrooms we were grateful to escape. Lucky. My arm around you, asleep, I imagine what our stories would be like 100 years ago. 100 years ago two people like us would never be in the same city, same province, separated by oceans. Our parents & parents' parents savor these secrets like hard candy clinking against the backs of their teeth, the silent hiss of their mouths refusing to open for the fear of losing something. Their accents something we must summon for certain stories. Would we still share the same tongues? My hair underneath your fingernails, your hair in between my fingers. Our breaths stink of skin, sunlight in dusty blinds. What would we have done to be with one another, then? Would it have been worth it for one night\u2014the coal-fueled train, relentless desert heat, a sailboat passing Greece to a larger vessel ready to cross the Atlantic? The months it would take. The pain of leaving the rivers where your family story started, the pain of the rivers redirected from a homestead where my ancestors live in the form of blue asters. The horses I would have in the burning dust. The horses I would have buried in the ground. The horses we wouldn\u2019t own, either way, together. Touching each other\u2019s faces would risk a necklace made of rope, the judgment of gravity from a tree. Touching each other\u2019s faces always risks something, even now. Together, hours in bed dissolve like sugar in water. There\u2019s more clean water in the kitchen than we can ask for. How many nights did our parents' parents snuff out the light worrying for such things to stay alive, to stay hydrated while outrunning hate? Even still none of us, as children, could imagine having a palm with a blue glow & so much power we could fit the world into our fist, much less them. For once I wish I could explain this to you, to us, to everyone wondering why we\u2019re like this loving someone we know is gone before the body has left the bed, no matter how much our mouths thirsted for each other, sharing stiff drinks & making loose plans to nowhere. No, this isn\u2019t what they imagined for us. Neither did they imagine our chiseled faces, the glow we\u2019ve made of these skins that would surprise them with their smoothness, their color in the dark. Let every night like this be a toast to the names of those before us whose names we don\u2019t know & didn\u2019t have the chance to be this free, committed to finding a future of our own making, even if it\u2019s only once.\n\n<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My America Is Bagels My America is skin. Hide. The red hair periodically in my mustache. The sun\u2019s inability to burn me past the color of bread, whole wheat. My America is Guatemala. El salvador. My America is Chile. My America is unsure whether to pronounce Chile like the country or the admonishment you give […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6267,"featured_media":260160,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5557,5966,5561],"tags":[178,6105,5664],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nIn America, I Am Whole Wheat Bread - Electric Literature<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Two poems by Esteban Ismael\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/two-poems-by-esteban-ismael\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"In America, I Am Whole Wheat Bread - 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