im light on top
of tall hills
im laughing at my own
hands o i am so fucked
up, hill with goldren rod
butt naked under neath
morning really soaked with
what i love of undying nd
god i am being laid out in flowers
im gonna die


​




the sonoran is screaming
i am slithering across the top of the bus
i smell blood







my heart
the gay mtn  of corn
we are looking @ how the tongue of
the plants and the animals
make us wet with the sun lite we are
on a mountain i am brushing the morning pearls from u wet haired animal :) sweet heart

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.

Falling in Love 

A penguin’s love looks like a heart. It is the thinness of necks and beaks settling into each other, the silence of heads and bellies touching. This is the most delicate act you will find in a buried land. This act is the whole world rushing beneath their feet, the map of Antarctica printing itself on the inside of their skin, the negative of their silhouettes flashing in closed eyelids. A penguin’s love holds up the horizon when it’s mussed with snow. It lasts the length of a continent and back again, over and over. I cannot prepare you for the gravity you will feel, but I can tell you this: Touch your bellies together and lean your head in. It might be the closest you ever get to love. 







Long Love

Is nine months a lifetime to a penguin? This, the length of their monogamy, the longest love story Antarctica can bear. A marriage of journeys to and from the sea. Their vows: I promise to come back. I promise to recognize your voice again.  Ours: Cherish. From this day forward. Till death do us part. Penguin spouses leave marks of their travels in the snow with their bellies and claws, hoping that someone will remember. I walked those roads of ice to come back, not to you, but to myself, to the woman I saw in my dreams. As I went I dragged my rib bone on the continent for you, its end pockmarking the snow, a souvenir. Did you find this memory of me in your wandering? The penguin wife returns to the gift of her child, to the sound of love manufactured and sung just for her. I return, hoping for such a song, for the gift of being recognized. 







Death Love Song

My mother’s voice on the phone after my brother died was smoky thick and sweet with pain. I thought I felt the oceans that divided us shiver with sadness. Every atom bows to the sound of a mother’s love. The penguin stands behind her dead chick, head hung in front of her chest in defeat. She keens, commanding the ice to honor its victim. It is a sound that only a lossmother can hear; only they know the crush of sky collapsing into their bodies. There is no way around. You must keep walking this earth that took your children. Write your grief on the sky and wrap yourself in cold. Sing while you wait for the air to change. 


​

for burial

memory is sticky juice, sweet
only when drinking

your face a cellphone
i’d like to smash

juice or light,
i swear the darkness is darkening

ice crystals / lunar halo
refracting and reflecting

that one face you made
the sound

tomorrow’s new moon
catches a blue shadow
i am confused,
still
think of you

waning
waning
waning







pink flamingo tuxedo 

bad men 
dream 

dated 
Facebook photos

GUAC TALK: 
my sweater smells

white wine & hot dogs
diet goals

only humans
grow smaller

you've been 
warned

water
out of reach 

i called my mother
to officiate the wedding

my favorite part
was petting the black cat


​

Although I know that silence is the future of
all days I still like to observe beautiful things
like this right now on the street:
orange hot sun above the painted
clouds –
some day we’ll sing the song of salvation,
some day we’ll be shrouded in ashes;
I will count the time that’s left for me ‘till
this moment of the day breaks in hundredths
of a second,
and I will throw my hat in the air
to greet the arriving autumn.
Today…
             But tomorrow the sky will be empty.

All the birds had flown to nowhere.


​