The Kingdom of Touching
Tonight, I will baptize you with my mouth.
Trace the velvet & sandpaper of your skin with my lips.
Dip into the honey bouquet of you.
Fill myself with your every flavor.
Touch you and touch you and touch you and
touch you and touch you until your sins
and your ghosts have nowhere left to haunt.
Tonight, let me relearn your ghosts.
Put on soft music. Light candles.
Make fables of your scar maps.
I know you split the skin
to make the body a mosaic of accidents.
All your ghosts know how to undress your sadness.
But when I undress you, I will fill myself with a bountiful harvest.
Ask me and I will slip
out of this body of lacework.
Worship you in the absence of breathing.
Belief in the absence of sky.
Say “yes, you are made for this sort of worship”.
I stand in awe of such a blessing.
My knees know the carpet;
I know how to make you trumpet to falsetto.
Disappear into my negative spaces and make me again.
I know how to make archways of your spine.
Knowing all fire comes from the root stem of ‘yes’ ‘again’ ‘please’ ‘more’,
My thighs, these hands, are a sugar to salvation.
What I want is to drink
the salt & wine from you.
I am a greedy heaven,
hungry to make you a shivering night.
Sing: make me beg
until I am as rough on the outside as I am within.
Sing: god of gripped sheets
of pissed, sleepless neighbors
of parting lips
of the curious tongue
of reckless fingers
of bed legs giving way
from the world we create
and destroy and create
of love bites
of crescent moon nail marks.
How you learn to twist and pull
unravel and partition me.
How I have taught your hands to build
me into a nation of hungry mouths
until I am a pool of myself--
to make me speak in tongues.
Sing: everyone believes in God 30 seconds before they come
and you come with thighs full of offerings.
We are eternal this way:
Listen to me, I am telling you a true thing.
Blessed be the seasons where your body
rhymes with my body.
This is the monument we will make of each other:
I followed your scar maps to a landscape of skin
How you live to touch my smoothest parts--
measure me by degrees of satin and sweat and desire.
Understanding sacred geometry and divinity make the same body.
God our bodies:
what you will bear witness to on this eve,
how my lungs will scream your name like a land declaring independence.
Nothing else matters.
This is the kingdom of nipples
The kingdom of teeth marks
Kingdom of quivering thighs
Kingdom of earlobes
This is most important kingdom:
how we wrecked each other to magnificence.
Esperanza
My grandmother has hands like regret.
Like joy.
Like a runaway.
She was young like me, foolish like me.
She could lift her hands & the wind bows,
shift her legs & a man’s knees would buckle.
Could turn him to a drought with a single glance.
Part her lips and the congregation settled their spirits
as it curled & hushed into fire inside them.
The story goes she would enter a room
& they laid palm trees for her to walk on,
coconut for her feet
& her presence reminded men of their mortality.
Until grandpa.
Until he charmed the light out of her.
Or beat it out.
Turned her to a bruised horizon.
Pressed the color out of her.
I don’t know which part of the story is true, but
I know she passes through me every time the sun dies
& the night loosens its blue-black skin for stars.
Ritual Switch
Instead it will be your swift backhand that undoes me,
brutal in its bursting,
until the raised skin reaches for mercy
tomorrow you will motion
for the chancla when I get a wrong answer
on my math homework
the next day the choir in my flesh will stand,
each pore blooming with blood
when the extension cord meets me
this nerve to meet a god in the eye
as though we are equal
so you break the wooden spoon across my face
and this must be love,
yes, because you bring me to the end of myself
again & again
to save me from my foolishness,
from the designated bullet baton pepper spray curb stomp
which has promised
its full force upon my skull
this family heirloom
is all you have to give
dear god
dear father-god
dear father,
if this is my inheritance
pull each cry from me
until I am ruined beyond wanting
until I am a proper disciple
Nyctophilia
I.
The desert
is a single held breath.
The nights here are so empty
I forget why I’m alive.
Grandma is God’s breath sweeping around me.
She is a bundle of unnamed stars,
the ones that stitch themselves
into a different beauty every night.
II.
This is how the desert settles:
When the wind tires of turning
sand grains for answers,
the arid breath becomes a wave void of water.
Sun crosses my window,
marking the world for departure.
Trains drag their ankles full of rust.
In evening’s breath:
Rest, the echo seems to say. But I can’t
so I step out of myself.
In my dreams, Grandma comes for me.
She creeps along the walls.
Asks me to say her name but I have forgotten.
Asks me for water, even though water cannot save her.
I am so thirsty where I am.
She is buried in a village mom does not know the name of.
I tell mom demons come to my dreams
wearing Grandma’s skin.
Mom still sleeps with her Bible under her bed.
She doesn’t know how not to.
III.
Train horns come through the open window
singing my chest open.
Grandma’s spirit is cold air passing through me.
She tells me she is buried in sky,
that stars are what happen when the dead refuse to let go of living.
Before: To Kingdom Come
don’t look me in the eye when I am talking to you
try me one more time don’t let him I will give you something
to cry about little shit don’t let him who the fuck
do you think you’re talking to try me don’t let him
again & watch me don’t let him
don’t let him slap the taste from your mouth little fuck
wanna keep crying I’ll give you
something to cry about I’ll break you
don’t let him to kindling
I’ll send you back don’t let him to the shithole
you came from carve your last will & testament
into the floorboard don’t let him
don’t let him don’t let him don’t let him
open all your eyes
because no god will come to deliver you
baby, don’t let him chase your mind to the forest.
I.S. Jones is a writer, educator, and hip-hop head hailing from Southern California. She is a 2015 fellow with The Watering Hole. I.S. is Blk & loud about it. Her work interrogates the spaces of race, love, the body, sexuality all while being a witness of life.
She is the Assistant Editor at Chaparral, a literary magazine based in Southern California. Her works have appeared in The Harpoon Review, Fat City Review, Qua Magazine, The Blueshift Journal, SunDog Lit, Matador Review, anthologies, and other publications. She received her MFA from Hofstra University. I.S. is currently running for Poet Laureate of the Moon. Find her on twitter @arurianshire.
She is the Assistant Editor at Chaparral, a literary magazine based in Southern California. Her works have appeared in The Harpoon Review, Fat City Review, Qua Magazine, The Blueshift Journal, SunDog Lit, Matador Review, anthologies, and other publications. She received her MFA from Hofstra University. I.S. is currently running for Poet Laureate of the Moon. Find her on twitter @arurianshire.
