What My Downturned Eyes Are Good For alexis torres marroquín
11:15 PM. Same knife. Same blood. Same soft place in me. The bass grunts, Twitchy kicks split the floor. Sweat slaps the air. Lights strobe like a warning I ignore. I see Him. Black tank. Jeans hanging low enough to pray to. Hair falling just right. Jaw cut mean. Nose built to bruise a mouth. Armpits open, musk cutting across the room like a shoulder check. Tattoos crawling up his arms, guarding what I don’t get. My drooling lips. I stiffen in places I don’t wish to cover up. I tell myself the glances mean something. That when his eyes snag mine it’s permission. That until then, I shouldn't move. My own eyes, Desperate. Leaking worship. Begging to be handled. Begging to be slapped.
He doesn’t move. I don’t move. I just watch. Some clumsy white boy does what I won’t. Strokes himself in. Occupies his desires. They grind out the fantasy I’ve been stockpiling for years. Their mouths collide. My gut caves. The bass keeps hitting like it’s in on the joke. Outside, the street is cold enough to ice the bruises. But I’m still bleeding. Same fracture. Same glitch firing under my ribcage. I tell myself I was only here to dance. I tell myself I shouldn't take this seriously. This is all it takes to break. The wound is bearable. But it never scars. In seven days, on the same sticky floor standing in the same disco light my body will lift its head again to wait wait wait and look away.
To Be Taken for One of Them alexis torres marroquín Deep in the northern rise of a land that refuses my mouth a river keeps moving without me. They say our mother’s lost children live there, small-bodied, brown-skinned, dark hair sealed to the head with water eyes drawn low at the corners like mine. They don’t stand still long enough to be claimed. They move quick, bare feet learning the grammar of stone, shoulders slick with waterlight, laughing in sounds that bend, click, dissolve. Green breaks on them like light, blue opens like flesh, they breathe it in without dividing it. They circle the watering hole I once entered under his watch, the same water that held him as a boy, before his voice thinned, before his smile learned to close itself. He stood different there. Looser. As if the river knew his name and he believed it. Now he swallows that language. Lets it rot behind his teeth.
The children still speak it, their mouths stay wet with it, color gathering there, refusing to thin into memory. He calls them beautiful but won’t repeat them. Says nothing survives translation. I want to believe him. I don’t. I keep turning north, through mouths that empty on contact, through hands that cannot hold what moves. I wade back into the river. The children watching. I want to be taken for one of them. Not learned into it. Not welcomed. Misread. Entered without question or pulled under for trying. Tell me, what is inherited, and what is stolen by wanting? If I speak it, does it break in my mouth too? Or worse, does it answer me?
Catch Me While You Still Can alexis torres marroquín They stop him once under bad lighting- fluorescent, homophobic. The kind that makes everyone guilty. Brown body. This one. Pulled aside, edges already bent, still technically usable. Posture half-corrected. Voice deepened. Smile rehearsed wrong. He learns early: stillness reads safer than truth. Later, the same body reappears with better marketing. On phones. In bathrooms. In bars named after nuclear explosions. Hairy ass. Good ass. Ass you don’t bring home. Ass you thank quietly and forget loudly. They ask where he’s from Expecting an answer Below the Texan border. They ask what he does.
What he’ll do. What he’s into.
Desire here is convenient. View profile. Tap. Open album. Ask for a face pic. Behind it, he becomes useful. No story to slow things down. Just pressure. Heat. Expectation. Someone jokes- you people know how to fuck. He laughs. He always laughs. It keeps things lubricated. In the dark, they imagine danger. Hunger. Something animal enough to excuse their hands. He lets them. Sometimes letting is cheaper than refusing. Invisibility works until it doesn’t. Outside, the night clicks back on. Cameras blinking. A cop car idling. A notification buzzing.
He checks himself in a window— face intact, ass sore, name still wrong. To live like this is to be constantly legible and never read. Stopped. Desired. Teased. No lesson. No soft landing. Just one body this one moving language thinning humor gone flat laughter not opening anything just feet ass torso stop go yes okay fine
Before My Body Dries alexis torres marroquín Let it be known I was never really a painter, never claimed the cruelty of brush kissing canvas, never begged pigment to bless me— though it did beg. Loudly. Color always moaned too loudly, a migraine in magenta, an indigo insult that wouldn’t stay put. I swore painting was dead and each time I said it something in my hand pulsed— a palette, yes, but also something smaller, meaner, refusing burial. My watercolors were ugly, gaudy, greedy little ghosts— a carnival of colors climaxing past the point of looking. It really was my best work. My only honest work. Failure has a texture— sticky, overbright, impossible to rinse out.
I kept making things that would not behave at a distance. They leaned forward. They wanted something. (So did I, but that’s not painting.) I called it abundance. Others called it too much. The paper called it damage. In the hallway of my life— fluorescent, flickering— someone has left the exit sign on. A voice– not mine– not not mine– insists: dignity in desire. Sings it– swings it– off-key, won’t tire. Pink kink– don’t think– just– fire. Dignity– dig in me– liar– said with the tongue not quite pulling back— like it’s stuck on the act.
It grins when it says it, lets the vowel stretch thin— diiiignity— like it wants in, or out— or both. Let it be known: I wasn’t much of a poet either, though I learned quickly how to fake an ending. Perhaps it’s structure. Or a lapse in judgment. But we can call it choreography if that helps you get off. I was just always horny, half-furious—still— and prone to leaving things unfinished: a painting, a stanza, a lover. At dawn, sometimes, there’s a shirt— not mine— and something faint on the collar, not quite a stain, not quite a memory, just enough color to prove it happened, not enough to keep.